Private Jet Costs, Sketchy Deductions Among Red Flags in Trump Taxes

Dozens of audit triggers litter Donald Trump’s tax returns, according to Congress’s top non-partisan tax lawyers: questionable private jet expenses, large unsubstantiated charitable deductions and dubious payments to the former president’s children, among others.

Yet none of them have been seriously audited, according to a new report from the Joint Committee on Taxation that reveals information Trump has fought to keep secret for years.

The analysis from the Joint Committee found that Trump was able to use questionable deductions and aggressive tax strategies to minimize his tax bills. The data also showed that Trump and his businesses lost tens of millions of dollars while he was running for president and after he entered the White House.

Flagged Issues

Among the items the report says should merit scrutiny are tens of millions of dollars in deductions claimed by Trump and his companies, including for business expenses incurred while president and $126.5 million in write-offs over five years tied to sales from an entity that didn’t appear to be selling anything.

Another issue flagged was a $21.1 million deduction for a conservation easement at Trump’s Seven Springs property in New York’s Westchester County. That issue has been the subject of a fraud lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James earlier this year, which Trump has dismissed as a political attack.

In a release late Tuesday, House Democrats said Trump’s resistance to transparency — as well as the Internal Revenue Service’s lackadaisical approach to its policy of annual audits for presidents — are to blame for the former leader potentially breaking U.S. tax laws that he took an oath to uphold.

The report, which culminates the House Ways and Means Committee’s more than three-year long effort to obtain Trump’s tax returns, was made public after the committee voted on party lines to release the information.

The actual tax returns, which include hundreds of pages of Trump’s personal and business filings for the years between 2015 and 2020, will be released in redacted form in the coming days.

Future Audits

House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, who led the effort to investigate Trump’s tax returns and the IRS’s presidential audit program, said he is introducing a bill that would legally require the agency to audit every president within 90 days of taking office.

Trump long said he would be happy to release his taxes but that he wasn’t doing so on the advice of lawyers because he was being audited.

While House Democrats won their lengthy legal battle to obtain Trump’s tax returns after he exhausted all his legal options, any political benefit for Democrats may be largely muted as most voters have already hardened their stances on Trump. Moreover, bigger controversies and other storylines have come to the fore in the past three years.

That period includes two impeachments and acquittals: one for seeking assistance from Ukraine to discredit his Democratic political rivals and the second for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

Over that time Trump also lost his second bid for the presidency, was blamed for the poor showing of Republicans in November’s mid-term elections and hosted a controversial racist commentator at his Mar-a-Lago estate.