According to the tax data that was released on Tuesday by a House committee, during Donald J. Trump’s first three years as president, he paid a total of $1.1 million in federal income taxes. However, in the year 2020, he paid no taxes at all as his income decreased and his losses once again increased.
The information, which includes specifics of Mr. Trump’s federal tax returns beginning in 2015 and continuing through the entirety of his time in the White House, reveals that he started out as president with the same kind of significant business losses that had characterised a significant portion of his career and paid almost no income tax. But things turned around for him in 2018, when he claimed a 24 million dollar increase in his adjusted gross income and paid over one million dollars in federal taxes.
According to Mr. Trump’s tax filings, he continued to have a profitable year the next year as well, claiming a total income of $4.4 million and only paying taxes of $133,445. But in the year 2020, when the nation was reeling from the effects of the coronavirus epidemic, Mr. Trump’s finances took a turn for the worst, and he recorded a loss of $4.8 million while paying no income tax.
Two reports that were released late on Tuesday by the House Ways and Means Committee revealed new information about Mr. Trump’s tax returns. The committee had waged a legal battle to obtain the records from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the reports were the result of that battle. The papers offer a summary of the committee’s conclusions, but they do not contain the raw tax returns themselves; they are scheduled to be made public in the coming days.
The new evidence adds to what is already known to the general public about Mr. Trump’s income tax history, which is something he battled for years to keep concealed from the public. In the year 2016, The New York Times published an article that provided in-depth information on Mr. Trump’s and the hundreds of entities that make up his business organization’s tax returns spanning more than two decades. These documents revealed a scenario that was significantly different from the one that he had presented to the general public in the United States.
His reports to the Internal Revenue Service painted a picture of a businessman who took in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, but racked up chronic losses that he aggressively employed in order to avoid paying taxes. These losses were incurred because of his aggressive tax avoidance strategies. However, the information that was disclosed on Tuesday covers his entire administration, but the personal income tax data that was studied by The Times only went as far back as 2017, which was Trump’s first full year in the White House.
As was previously reported by The Times, Mr. Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax and reported $12.9 million in losses in his first year as president. This is in keeping with a long pattern of reporting losses and paying little or no taxes, which has been a pattern for Mr. Trump throughout his business career. According to statistics that was only just made public, his dramatic surge in income in 2018 was primarily attributable to the fact that he had recently sold properties or assets for a profit of $22 million. It looks as if he had used up all of the company losses that he had been carrying over from one year to the next in order to lower the amount of his taxable income.
By the year 2020, Mr. Trump, on the other hand, had resumed declaring losses. In point of fact, despite the capital gains that bolstered his bottom line in 2018, the whole of his main companies, which mostly consist of real estate, golf courses, and hotels, continued to post losses every year, which added up to a total of $60 million while he was in office. Because he had already paid an anticipated amount of taxes amounting to millions of dollars, which he ultimately did not owe, he was entitled to get his $5.47 million back.
The report that was released on Tuesday also contains information that casts doubt on some aspects of Mr. Trump’s business operations. As a result, the committee has recommended that the Internal Revenue Service conduct further investigations into certain of those aspects.
The tax documents that The Times has previously received reveal that Mr. Trump made large charity gifts over the years. However, the great majority of those donations came in the form of land grants, and this was often after he had exhausted all of his attempts to develop the site.
Since that time, he has been able to deduct $2.2 million in property taxes as a business expenditure, despite the fact that the law only permits individuals to deduct $10,000 in property taxes year as a tax deduction.
On Tuesday, the committee disclosed that the Internal Revenue Service was investigating the tax strategy in question.
The records also demonstrated that Mr. Trump continued to earn huge quantities of interest income, totaling $38.1 million while he was serving as president of the United States. They do not disclose the origin of that income, but previous tax returns obtained by The Times showed that through 2017, the vast majority of his interest income came from his share of profits earned by a partnership that is controlled by Vornado Realty Trust. Despite this, they do not disclose the origin of that income.
The partnership is the proud owner of two high-value office buildings: the 1290 Sixth Avenue building in Manhattan and the 555 California Street building in San Francisco. Mr. Trump has no power over the partnership’s operation despite the fact that it has consistently been his most profitable asset. Mr. Trump’s stake in the partnership is equal to thirty percent.