Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross ‘lied’ about his wealth, says Forbes

Exaggerated to get onto its Forbes 400 list: magazine

Forbes magazine says that U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross “lied to us” about his net worth, exaggerating it by billions of dollars to make the widely-cited “Forbes 400” list of the richest people in America. Ross was dropped from the list for 2017 after being a presence for 13 years.

In an article Dan Alexander posted Tuesday, Forbes said it discovered a discrepancy after examining Ross’s government financial disclosure forms, on which Ross, a Wall Street investor before President Donald Trump put him in his cabinet, listed his assets at $700 million.

That’s not even close to qualifying for what the magazine calls “the country’s most exclusive club” in which the richest person, Bill Gates, is worth $89 billion and the poorest a mere $2 billion.

Nor was it close to what Ross had told the magazine he was worth in 2016, about $3.7 billion or to what he told Forbes recently, that his net worth was about $2.7 billion.

When Forbes asked Ross about the wide gap between the worth he claims and the assets on his government disclosure forms, he said he that he had put “more than $2 billion” into trusts for his family just between the election and his nomination as Commerce Secretary that did not have to be disclosed in the federal filings. Added to the $700 million, that would place his worth at about $2.7 billion. He insisted to Forbes that he still qualified for the widely-cited rich list.

But he declined to provide documentation of the $2 billion transfer of money into trusts, citing “privacy issues,” Forbes said.

Forbes reported that it consulted ethics and tax experts who raised questions about Ross’s assertion.

“If Ross had owned $2 billion of additional assets before the election,” the article said, “wouldn’t they have produced income that he was required to disclose, even if he no longer owned the assets? And why would someone apparently transfer $2 billion to his family, thereby triggering more than $800 million in gift taxes, especially with a president in the White House who was prepared to eliminate the estate tax and therefore much of the cost of transferring fortunes to later generations?”

On top of that, the Commerce Department later contradicted Ross’s claim about the transfer of $2 billion. After Forbes first raised questions about Ross’s claimed wealth in an Oct. 16 article, the department, Forbes reported, issued a statement saying that “Contrary to the report in Forbes, there was no major asset transfer to a trust in the period between the election and Secretary Ross’s confirmation.”

In Tuesday’s article, Forbes said that “after one month of digging” Forbes is “confident” that the $2 billion “never existed. It seems clear that Ross lied to us, the latest in an apparent sequence of fibs, exaggerations, omissions, fabrications and whoppers that have been going on with Forbes since 2004.” The article went on to claim that Ross has been exaggerating his wealth for years, starting in 2004, when he led Forbes, as it was compiling its rich list, to believe he was worth “four times as much” as he was.

It also acknowledged that “Forbes continued to largely fall for it.”

No spokesperson for Ross could be reached for comment by The Washington Post.