In ’95,Trump claimed a $916M loss, report says
Analysts: GOP presidential nominee could have averted taxes for 18 years
Donald Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by the New York Times show.
Donald Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by the New York Times show.
The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.
Tax experts hired by the Times to analyze Trump’s 1995 records said tax rules that are especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.
While his taxable income in subsequent years is as yet unknown, a $916 million loss in 1995 would have been large enough to wipe out more than $50 million a year in taxable income over 18 years.
The loss certainly could have eliminated any federal taxes Trump otherwise would have owed on the $50,000 to $100,000 he was paid for each episode of “The Apprentice,” or the $45 million he was paid between 1995 and 2009 when he was chairman or chief executive of the pub- licly traded company he created to assume ownership of his Atlantic City casinos.
Investors in the new company, meanwhile, saw the value of their shares plunge to 17 cents from $35.50, while scores of contractors went unpaid for work on Trump’s casinos and bondholders received pennies on the dollar.
“He has a vast benefit from his destruction” in the early 1990s, said one of the experts, Joel Rosenfeld, an assistant professor at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate. Rosenfeld offered this description of what he would advise a client who came to him with a tax return like Trump’s: “Do you realize you can create $916 million in income without paying a nickel in taxes?”
Trump declined to comment on the documents. Instead, the campaign released a statement that neither challenged nor confirmed the $916 million loss: “Mr. Trump is a highlyskilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsi- bility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required. That being said, Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes.”
The documents examined by the Times consisted of three pages from what appeared to be Trump’s 1995 tax returns. The pages were mailed last month to a reporter at the Times with a return address that claimed the envelope had been sent from Trump Tower.