THE only reasons donald drumpf won't release his tax returns are because he paid no taxes or paid very little in taxes. Amazing that his supporters don't have a problem with that, that they don't mind picking up the tax tab for him while having services cut because he hasn't paid his fair share of taxes. At least Hillary Clinton has released her's and Bill's tax returns for the past 30 years. I offer these because the election is getting close between the candidates as well as the date, 8 NOV 16, and the American people have the right to know if our president has filed honest tax returns, and "as Richard Nixon told us, Americans should know to a certainty that their president is no crook". From +The Daily Beast and the +Washington Post
New Evidence Donald Trump Didn’t Pay Taxes
If the presumptive GOP nominee keeps hiding his returns, Congress could force him to show his hand with a one-line amendment to the tax code.
New questions about the integrity of Donald Trump’s income tax returns, and new indications that he does not pay income taxes, arise from rulings in two tax appeals that Trump filed in the 1990s. Trump lost both cases.
Trump’s 1984 federal income tax return included a Schedule C, the form used by sole proprietors, the decision in the first case shows.
Trump listed no income on that form, yet he deducted $626,264 as expenses. His New York City tax return also showed no income, but listed slightly less in expenses: $619,227.
No receipts, invoices, or other documentation were provided when Trump was under audit or during his appeal from what he argued was an unfair demand for more tax.
“The record does not explain how Petitioner [Trump] had significant expenses without any concomitant income from his consulting business,” wrote H. Gregory Tillman, the city administrative law judge who heard the case on April 29 and May 28 of 1992.
Jack Mitnick, the lawyer and accountant who prepared Trump’s tax returns for more than two decades, was Trump’s only witness. Mitnick testified that he was “thoroughly familiar” with the Trump tax returns and all aspects of the finances of Trump Tower, which were central to the appeal.
But when shown a photocopy of Trump’s 1984 tax return, Mitnick testified that “we did not” prepare that return, referring to himself and his firm, and he said did not know who did. However, Mitnick did not dispute that it was his signature on the photocopy.
The original tax return was never found, the judge noted.
Among the issues raised by Mitnick’s 1992 testimony is whether Trump or someone acting on his behalf substituted a return that he or someone else prepared and then transferred Mitnick’s signature using a photocopier.
Mitnick, now 71 and semi-retired, told me in a telephone interview Tuesday that he had no recollection of that case or a second appeal in which he represented Trump, whose returns he prepared until about 1995.
The second case was before the New York State Division of Tax Appeals in 1994 and concerned taxes on profits from selling units in an East 61st Street apartment building which was 90 percent owned by Trump, with his brother Robert and aide Louise Sunshine splitting the remaining share.
Again the issue was 1984 deductions Trump took without providing any documentation to auditors or when Frank W. Barrie, a state administrative law judge, heard his appeal.
It was in this appeal that the record shows Trump paid no income tax in 1984.
“Mr. Mitnick has prepared Donald Trump’s income tax returns for the last 20 years and testified that Mr. Trump had no income tax due against with the credit ‘could have been applied,’” Judge Barrie wrote in his 23-page opinion.
In the city case, Judge Tillman noted that Trump complained of double taxation, but found that claim baseless. Using bold face to emphasize his point, Judge Tillman wrote, “The problem at issue is not one of double taxation, but of no taxation.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to an emailed list of detailed questions about the two cases. A second email was also ignored.
These two decisions should prompt new calls for Trump to release his tax returns. He claims, falsely, that he cannot release his returns since 2012 because they are being audited. But a tax return is filed under penalty of perjury and releasing a return has no effect on an audit, as many tax authorities (including a former IRS commissioner) have noted.
But even accepting Trump’s specious claim, no reason exists for him to withhold his complete returns from 1980 through 2011 since by his account those audits are closed.
And to be clear, releasing just the summary of the tax return, the Form 1040, is not adequate. Trump, like all candidates as well as sitting presidents and vice presidents, should disclose his complete tax returns including every form, schedule, statement, and the worksheets so we see just how the tax liability was determined.
That Trump has no intention of ever releasing his tax returns became clear on May 13 when he snapped at an ABC anchor that his federal income tax rate “is none of your business.”
The tradition of presidential candidates disclosing their tax returns has an august purpose: making sure that another criminal is not a heartbeat from the presidency or in the Oval Office.
The disclosure tradition dates to when Spiro Agnew resigned as vice president in 1973 and then plead guilty to a tax crime. President Richard Nixon was an unindicted conspirator in a felony for which his tax lawyer Edward L. Morgan went to prison for creating a fraudulent $576,000 tax deduction on his behalf—one of the specifications in the impeachment proceedings that never came to a vote because Nixon resigned in August 1974.
Hillary Clinton, Trump’s expected opponent in the November election, and her husband have made public their complete tax returns going back more than three decades. Their returns since 1992 are available here.
Congressional Republicans who are distressed about Trump’s fitness to run for president could make his tax returns public. Indeed, in the 1920s tax returns were public record and newspapers routinely reported the precise income and tax paid by prominent Americans.
Congress could simply add a one-line amendment to Section 6103 of the tax code, which makes returns confidential, providing that the nominee of any party whose name appears on the ballot in say 10 or more states will have his or her complete tax returns, for as many years as the IRS has copies, posted on the IRS website.
Such a rule would be based on an objective standard—appearing on the ballots of many states as a presidential candidate—and thus any federal court should dismiss a legal attack as unfounded with an expedited appeal to the Supreme Court.
The record in these two cases offers clear evidence that Trump, at least in these two instances, has played fast and loose with his obligations as a taxpayer. It could throw light on why he’s offered so many different explanations about why he hasn’t disclosed his complete tax returns at least through the year 2011.
The facts in the two appeals could arguably be construed as evidence of calculated tax fraud, a felony. They certainly cry out for disclosure because, as Richard Nixon told us, Americans should know to a certainty that their president is no crook.
The last time information from Donald Trump’s income-tax returns was made public, the bottom line was striking: He had paid the federal government $0 in income taxes.
The disclosure, in a 1981 report by New Jersey gambling regulators, revealed that the wealthy Manhattan investor had for at least two years in the late 1970s taken advantage of a tax-code provision popular with developers that allowed him to report negative income.
Today, as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Trump regularly denounces corporate executives for using loopholes and “false deductions” to “get away with murder” when it comes to avoiding taxes.
“They make a fortune. They pay no tax,” Trump said last year on CBS. “It’s ridiculous, okay?”
The contrast highlights a potentially awkward challenge for Trump.
He has built a political identity around his reputation as a financial whiz, even bragging about his ability to game the tax code to pay as little as possible to the government — a practice he has called the “American way.” Moreover, he has aggressively pursued tax breaks and other government supports to bolster his real estate empire. But that history threatens to collide with his efforts to woo working-class voters who resent that they often pay higher tax rates than the wealthy who benefit from special loopholes.
Trump’s personal taxes are a mystery. He has refused to release any recent returns, meaning the public cannot see how much money he makes, how much he gives to charity and how aggressively he uses deductions, shelters and other tactics to shrink his tax bill.
Trump, who said last week on ABC that his tax rate is “none of your business,” would be the first major-party nominee in 40 years to not release his returns.
In an interview this week, Trump said that he has paid “substantial” taxes but declined to provide specifics.
He reiterated that he fights “very hard to pay as little tax as possible.”
“One of the reasons is because the government takes your money and wastes it in the Middle East and all over the place,” he said.
Trump’s contradictory approaches have been apparent for years.
He criticized 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney for delaying the release of his returns. Romney, a former private-equity executive, had come under fire for paying a low tax rate because most of his income came from investments.
“It’s a great thing when you can show that you’ve been successful and that you’ve made a lot of money,” Trump said at the time.
Romney eventually released returns showing that, for his 2011 taxes, he chose not to take certain deductions, bringing his tax rate more in line with that of average Americans.
Trump, early in his campaign, seemed ready to give voters a look at his tax filings.
In January, he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he was ready to disclose his “very big . . . very beautiful” returns.
But as his campaign gained momentum, Trump backed away from his declaration. He first claimed that ongoing audits by the Internal Revenue Service prevent disclosure.
Then last week, he told the Associated Press that voters are not interested in seeing his tax filings and that “there’s nothing to learn from them.”
Trump’s new position has unnerved some tax experts, who see value in the tradition of transparency by presidential contenders.
“At some point, he could be the tax collector in chief. He’d supervise the IRS, making sure all of us live up to our own tax responsibilities,” said Joe Thorndike, a director at Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that specializes in tax policy. “People deserve to know . . . how a person like that plays the game.”
Trump’s stance has become an issue in the campaign.
Romney said on Facebook last week that refusing to release tax returns should be “disqualifying” for any nominee and speculated that Trump’s returns could be hiding a “bombshell of unusual size.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) weighed in this week, telling reporters that Trump will “have to make that decision himself” but that presidential candidates’ releasing their returns has “certainly been the pattern for quite some time.”
Trump’s likely Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, who has disclosed decades of tax returns, released a 60-second ad last week asking, “What’s Donald Trump hiding?”
“You’ve got to ask yourself: ‘Why doesn’t he want to release it?’ ” Clinton said at a New Jersey rally last week. “Yeah, well, we’re gonna find out.”
Bob McIntyre of the liberal group Citizens for Tax Justice suspects Trump’s tax returns, if made public, would undermine the political image the candidate has crafted of a brilliant businessman with what his campaign has called “tremendous cash flow.”
Trump may be worried that “he’d show very little income on his tax returns compared to his wealth claims,” McIntyre said, adding that Trump’s returns could also show that he “writes off everything he has in his life — the hairdo, the plane — as business expenses.”
Trump has repeatedly said that he would be open to sharing his returns. In 2011, he said he would release them after President Obama released his long-form birth certificate but never did after the certificate’s release. In 2014, he said he would “absolutely” release them “if I decide to run for office.” Last year, he said he would release them when “we find out the true story on Hillary’s emails.”
To back his refusal, Trump has released a letter from his tax attorneys that said his tax returns had been audited by the IRS since 2002, and that audits on the returns since 2009 were still underway.
The attorneys’ letter also said returns from 2002 to 2008 had been closed administratively by the IRS, meaning their audits had been completed. Trump said in an interview that he would still not release those returns because “they’re all linked.”
But experts say that Trump is free to release his tax records. President Richard Nixon released his returns while under audit. Nothing, including an audit, “prevents individuals from sharing their own tax information,” an IRS spokesman said.
The only window into Trump’s handling of his income taxes came during the 1981 New Jersey gambling commission report.
Trump had submitted his 1978 and 1979 returns to the regulators as part of an application for a casino license. State records summarizing the returns show that Trump claimed that his combined income during those two years was negative $3.8 million, allowing him to pay no taxes. A few years earlier, he had told the New York Times he was worth more than $200 million.
Tax analysts say it is possible that Trump pays very low income taxes, or no taxes at all, using tactics available to wealthy investors and developers, such as depreciating the value of real estate.
When asked this week whether he pays income taxes, Trump said, “I will give that to you as soon as I get my audit finished.” He added later, “But with that being said, when you’re in the real estate business, you do have certain tax advantages.”
Trump has benefited from public money by aggressively seeking large tax reductions at developments including Trump Tower.
His first major development, the Grand Hyatt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, built in partnership with Chicago’s wealthy Pritzker family, was made possible with the help of a New York City tax subsidy worth $400 million over 40 years, according to city records.
It was New York’s first-ever tax abatement for a commercial property, secured by Trump with help from his developer father’s political allies, according to “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall,” a biography on Trump’s developments by investigative reporter Wayne Barrett.
Trump has defended his use of public tax assistance to boost private projects. He said opponents of such government supports, including some conservatives, are out of touch with reality.
“The true conservative philosophy is that a thing like that shouldn’t happen. But they’re in the world of the make-believe,” Trump said in an interview. “The real world is that without certain tax abatements, you have a choice. The job could get built . . . or you don’t have to have anything. It could just go stagnant, and a town can die.”
Trump’s strategy to ease his company’s tax burden has resulted in sore feelings in some communities, where local governments rely heavily on tax receipts from large businesses.
In Ossining, N.Y., home to a Trump National Golf Club, town officials say that a tax break being sought by the company would cost their coffers more than $200,000 a year.
In seeking the reduction, Trump’s attorneys have claimed that the club is worth far less than the roughly $15 million value assessed by the city.
Trump’s attorneys have filed papers with the state claiming that the “full market value” of the property is $1.4 million. The same golf course appears on Trump’s new financial disclosure form released this week as part of his presidential campaign — valued by him at more than $50 million.
Trump attorney Alan Garten did not respond to questions about the discrepancy.
Ossining Town Supervisor Dana Levenberg, a Democrat, expressed frustration that Trump seemed to be gaining “at other people’s loss.”
“It’s hard to look at someone who talks about their wealth frequently and think they got that successful on other people’s backs,” she said.
It's less than two months till Election Day. Catch up with the race.
Battleground state polling
Florida
Trump leads Clinton by less than one percentage point in the latest RealClearPolitics polling average.
Ohio
Trump has a two-point lead in the polling average. In a four-way matchup that includes both third-party nominees, Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party, Trump leads Clinton 42.5 percent to 40.8 percent.
Nevada and North Carolina
Trump leads by 2 points in Nevada and North Carolina. Hillary Clinton and her allies have outspent Trump and groups supporting him 7 to 1 on television ads in North Carolina.
Colorado
The polling average shows Clinton's lead here down to 2.5 points, down from double digits last month.
Here is what you need to know about presidential debates
The fall 2016 debate schedule
Mon., September 26
Presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
Tues., October 4
Vice presidential debate between Sen. Tim Kaine and Gov. Mike Pence
Sun., October 9
Presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
Wed., October 19
Presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
Campaign 2016
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