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Tax is the least of it. The article offers direct evidence of Trump’s impending financial liability to unknown lenders, and of pervasive conflicts of interest as president, that are of grave national security concern.
The consulting fees that Trump’s various foreign businesses paid to Ivanka Trump and others look potentially fraudulent. The Times article cites 20 percent consulting fees that foreign Trump businesses regularly deducted by reason of paying them to unnamed consultants. Some of these fees pertained to activities in which Trump’s role as an investor was ostensibly entirely passive, meaning that he wasn’t engaged in making any of the business decisions. Consulting fees also appear to have been paid to family members such as Ivanka Trump. She got consulting fees with respect to businesses for which she simultaneously worked as an executive, and thus as an employee.
Based on what the article says, several different types of fraud may have been involved here. Fees paid to family members who did not provide services in return would be improper deductions. Fees paid to “consultants” who were employees might be properly deductible by the business – as salary – but would potentially trigger 3.8 percent payroll tax liability by the recipient under the so-called Medicare payroll tax. Fees that were actually gifts to family members were not properly deductible, and also may have generated gift tax liability on Trump’s part that the mislabeling helped to conceal.
There is an old saying that one can never detect tax fraud purely on the face of a tax return – but this comes closer than usual. – Even wholly fraudulent tax returns generally do not proclaim their fraudulence on their face. The Trump returns presumably are no exception, and much of the evidence suggesting possible fraudulence was developed in the Times article through the use of other sources. Nonetheless, with that aid, the Times article makes a powerful initial case, clearly meriting investigation, that substantial tax fraud may have occurred.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device
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