The BIG ONE: 20 years of Trump taxes obtained by NYTs

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a Trump supporter by a long shot. But as a CPA, I'd want to see the actual tax returns. $750 tells me nothing. He may have been taking deductions that are allowed according to the U.S. tax code. Show us the actual returns.

As a CPA, you’re probably aware of the potential legal pitfalls of claiming massive losses to avoid paying federal income taxes while inflating your revenues and assets on bank documents for loan purposes. Wouldn’t you tell your client that constitutes fraud?

No. Not at all. The accounting systems for tax and for financial reporting purposes are substantially different beasts.

This. The general public just doesn't understand enough about the different reporting systems.

We know they are obscenely unfair.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a Trump supporter by a long shot. But as a CPA, I'd want to see the actual tax returns. $750 tells me nothing. He may have been taking deductions that are allowed according to the U.S. tax code. Show us the actual returns.

As a CPA, you’re probably aware of the potential legal pitfalls of claiming massive losses to avoid paying federal income taxes while inflating your revenues and assets on bank documents for loan purposes. Wouldn’t you tell your client that constitutes fraud?

No. Not at all. The accounting systems for tax and for financial reporting purposes are substantially different beasts.

They are different, but not so substantially different that they generate fundamentally different results. Plus a lot of the differences go more to timing than to actual valuation, revenues, etc., so over the course of years the numbers should converge.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a Trump supporter by a long shot. But as a CPA, I'd want to see the actual tax returns. $750 tells me nothing. He may have been taking deductions that are allowed according to the U.S. tax code. Show us the actual returns.

As a CPA, you’re probably aware of the potential legal pitfalls of claiming massive losses to avoid paying federal income taxes while inflating your revenues and assets on bank documents for loan purposes. Wouldn’t you tell your client that constitutes fraud?

No. Not at all. The accounting systems for tax and for financial reporting purposes are substantially different beasts.

This. The general public just doesn't understand enough about the different reporting systems.

The accounting systems for taxes and for obtaining property loans, should be the same. Because we are business owners of a pass through entity, we sometimes have low or negative AGI. It absolutely interferes with our ability to get loans, because on paper, it looks like we have no income.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a Trump supporter by a long shot. But as a CPA, I'd want to see the actual tax returns. $750 tells me nothing. He may have been taking deductions that are allowed according to the U.S. tax code. Show us the actual returns.

$750 says Trump pays less in taxes than most working Americans.

The NYTimes article says his businesses are not profitable, that some of his deductions are legally dubious, and that he is in massive amounts of debt. You had time to post here but not enough time to read the article?

There's a paywall. Not everyone can read it.

Journalists need to be paid. The $35/year for the full access subscription is more than Trump paid in taxes most years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As an accountant I am not surprised by this number at all. He has lost a lot of money on a lot of businesses. Without more detail, the $750 has very little meaning. It's just being dropped to get people outraged

+1.
Another accountant here.

Agreed.

And, let's not forget that by the end of his 1st term, he will have donated $1,600,000 to various government agencies. He has had no salary during his term.

Just because he donated it doesn't mean it wasn't income that doesn't need to be reported and taxed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For the sake of argument, let’s say all if this was legal (it wasn’t). He’s still an extraordinarily horrible business man. Maga decided we needed a businessman who would run this country like he runs his businesses. Welp, here we are! Hope you’re happy! The country is now another failed Trump business.

Exactly.

If you wanted a real businessman, then Romney, Cuban, Steyer or Bloomberg is your guy. Not this conman.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Fox News isn’t covering it AT ALL. Not even a “Dems claim” or “leaked records allege.” Nothing. Meanwhile, one of the lead stories is Biden’s response to a request for a drug test and Trump taking the media to task for not covering more about Hunter Biden. WHAT?! Crazy that people consider it a legitimate news source...

And this is after the FBI and Senate Intel have already said the Hunter Biden story is literally Russian disinformation propagated by Rudy, Ron Johnson, Chuck Grassley via GRU agent Andrei Derkach.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For the sake of argument, let’s say all if this was legal (it wasn’t). He’s still an extraordinarily horrible business man. Maga decided we needed a businessman who would run this country like he runs his businesses. Welp, here we are! Hope you’re happy! The country is now another failed Trump business.

Exactly.

If you wanted a real businessman, then Romney, Cuban, Steyer or Bloomberg is your guy. Not this conman.

So he's a bad businessman and a fraud. The only other appeal is the racism and hatred.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As an accountant I am not surprised by this number at all. He has lost a lot of money on a lot of businesses. Without more detail, the $750 has very little meaning. It's just being dropped to get people outraged

As an accountant we call bullshit

Panama doesn't have personal income taxes. Someone is comparing apples to orangutans.

[Anonymous]

So Trump is like 75,000,000 other Americans who pay no income taxes.



As a CPA I can professionally tell everyone here that >99% of DCUMers have absolutely no idea how business or high wealth taxes work, yet will jump to whatever conclusions they see fit.

Look at amazon as an example. Every letter to shareholders they advocate for “maximizing the present value of future cash flows” (if you don’t know what that means you have no hope of understanding Trump's tax returns).

Ultimately it is a strategy to reinvest cash flows into future earning potential to avoid paying income taxes. Amazon as a company had negative net income but was still worth hundreds of billions of dollars due to generating massive future free cash flow.

At some level, if you have positive net income as a business, you don’t know what to do with your money and are happy to waste some on tax. That sums up trumps tax returns - he doesn’t want to waste any money paying taxes.

Reading New York Times attempt to analyze trumps tax returns is like reading a toddler try to interpret Benjamin Graham. NYT's hack job is pure cringe worthy. They aren’t even consistent on how they talk about depreciation and never even mention what free cash flow even is.

To all the democrats out there - this ain’t it chief. Of course this will never get brought to light with a free and fair counter argument published in the NYT, because discussing gritty aspects of the US tax code is a snooze fest. Gotta sell the hyperbole and outrageous headlines.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a Trump supporter by a long shot. But as a CPA, I'd want to see the actual tax returns. $750 tells me nothing. He may have been taking deductions that are allowed according to the U.S. tax code. Show us the actual returns.

As a CPA, you’re probably aware of the potential legal pitfalls of claiming massive losses to avoid paying federal income taxes while inflating your revenues and assets on bank documents for loan purposes. Wouldn’t you tell your client that constitutes fraud?

No. Not at all. The accounting systems for tax and for financial reporting purposes are substantially different beasts.

This. The general public just doesn't understand enough about the different reporting systems.

You know, I know next to nothing about tax law, but I do know that someone who lives like Donald Trump should be paying a lot more than $750 in taxes, and that Trump's tax reform only exacerbated this problem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a Trump supporter by a long shot. But as a CPA, I'd want to see the actual tax returns. $750 tells me nothing. He may have been taking deductions that are allowed according to the U.S. tax code. Show us the actual returns.

As a CPA, you’re probably aware of the potential legal pitfalls of claiming massive losses to avoid paying federal income taxes while inflating your revenues and assets on bank documents for loan purposes. Wouldn’t you tell your client that constitutes fraud?

No. Not at all. The accounting systems for tax and for financial reporting purposes are substantially different beasts.

This. The general public just doesn't understand enough about the different reporting systems.

The accounting systems for taxes and for obtaining property loans, should be the same. Because we are business owners of a pass through entity, we sometimes have low or negative AGI. It absolutely interferes with our ability to get loans, because on paper, it looks like we have no income.

The requirements for obtaining commercial real estate property loans is set by the banks, not a government entity. For the sake of conformity, banks typically use a common set of requirements for smaller loans for efficiency. They will be more flexible on larger projects in the tens and hundreds of million dollars. This is also the reason why private equity is still a thing, because they will look at a wider range of financial information and lend money where banks won't.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a Trump supporter by a long shot. But as a CPA, I'd want to see the actual tax returns. $750 tells me nothing. He may have been taking deductions that are allowed according to the U.S. tax code. Show us the actual returns.

As a CPA, you’re probably aware of the potential legal pitfalls of claiming massive losses to avoid paying federal income taxes while inflating your revenues and assets on bank documents for loan purposes. Wouldn’t you tell your client that constitutes fraud?

No. Not at all. The accounting systems for tax and for financial reporting purposes are substantially different beasts.

This. The general public just doesn't understand enough about the different reporting systems.

You know, I know next to nothing about tax law, but I do know that someone who lives like Donald Trump should be paying a lot more than $750 in taxes, and that Trump's tax reform only exacerbated this problem.

Ignorant and proud of it!

You go girl/guy!

[Anonymous]

Who does he owe all the money to????

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As an accountant I am not surprised by this number at all. He has lost a lot of money on a lot of businesses. Without more detail, the $750 has very little meaning. It's just being dropped to get people outraged

As an accountant we call bullshit

Panama doesn't have personal income taxes. Someone is comparing apples to orangutans.

Someone didn’t read the quoted passage from the NYT or you’d know they weren’t talking about just personal income taxes.