Double Dipper Trump Used Legally Dubious Method To Avoid Paying Taxes

[Star]

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Double Dipper Trump Used Legally Dubious Method To Avoid Paying Taxes




Donald Trump is nothing if not a shyster.
In a nutshell, what Trump did to avoid paying taxes for 18 years is borrow money from banks and partners then-----then when his business went south he wrote off money that wasn't his as losses leaving his debtors holding the bag while simultaneously avoiding paying his fair share of taxes. It's more complicated than that but the above is a good start - the IRS needs 10,000 pages of tax legalese and Trump needs an army of lawyers to explain Trump's legally dubious tax avoidance scheme(s). See article below:


Donald Trump Used Legally Dubious Method to Avoid Paying Taxes

By DAVID BARSTOW, MIKE McINTIRE, PATRICIA COHEN, SUSANNE CRAIG and RUSS BUETTNER
OCT. 31, 2016

Donald J. Trump proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime in federal income taxes for years on end. He insists he merely exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire — loopholes he says Hillary Clinton failed to close during her years in the United States Senate. “Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I couldn’t use them?” Mr. Trump asked during a campaign rally last month.
But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.
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[owebo]

So?

 

[midcan5]

The irony of Trump is that he is what is wrong with America today in so many ways. A draft dodger, a tax cheat, an outsourcer, a misogynist, a racist, a business failure, and you can add more but why bother. His appeal is hatred for the other, whether is be immigrants or Hillary. Hate binds people like nothing else.

 

[owebo]

The irony of Trump is that he is what is wrong with America today in so many ways. A draft dodger, a tax cheat, an outsourcer, a misogynist, a racist, and you can add more but why bother. His appeal is hatred for the other, whether is be immigrants or Hillary. Hate binds people like nothing else.

We're talking about Trump, not Obama.....

 

[Lumpy 1]

Sheesh, the guy gets audited practically every year and the IRS has been exposed as a strong arm of the Democratic Party.

At the same Trump has employed tens of thousands of employees and is a true American success story

While Hillary and Bj Bill pocket 10's of millions each year selling out American taxpayers.etc. etc. etc.

You're throwing peanuts at a battleship...

 

[Mikeoxenormous]

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Double Dipper Trump Used Legally Dubious Method To Avoid Paying Taxes




Donald Trump is nothing if not a shyster.
In a nutshell, what Trump did to avoid paying taxes for 18 years is borrow money from banks and partners then-----then when his business went south he wrote off money that wasn't his as losses leaving his debtors holding the bag while simultaneously avoiding paying his fair share of taxes. It's more complicated than that but the above is a good start - the IRS needs 10,000 pages of tax legalese and Trump needs an army of lawyers to explain Trump's legally dubious tax avoidance scheme(s). See article below:


Donald Trump Used Legally Dubious Method to Avoid Paying Taxes

By DAVID BARSTOW, MIKE McINTIRE, PATRICIA COHEN, SUSANNE CRAIG and RUSS BUETTNER
OCT. 31, 2016

Donald J. Trump proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime in federal income taxes for years on end. He insists he merely exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire — loopholes he says Hillary Clinton failed to close during her years in the United States Senate. “Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I couldn’t use them?” Mr. Trump asked during a campaign rally last month.
But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.

LOL - she did dumbass.

Thanks to this one maneuver, which was later outlawed by Congress, Mr. Trump potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Mr. Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his returns, breaking a practice followed by every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate for more than four decades.

Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.

<snip>

As that empire floundered in the early 1990s, Mr. Trump pressured his financial backers to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in debt he could not repay. While the cancellation of so much debt gave new life to Mr. Trump’s casinos, it created a potentially crippling problem with the Internal Revenue Service. In the eyes of the I.R.S., a dollar of canceled debt is the same as a dollar of taxable income. This meant Mr. Trump faced the painful prospect of having to report the hundreds of millions of dollars of canceled debt as if it were hundreds of millions of dollars of taxable income.

But Mr. Trump’s audacious tax-avoidance maneuver gave him a way to simply avoid reporting any of that canceled debt to the I.R.S. “He’s getting something for absolutely nothing,” John L. Buckley, who served as the chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation in 1993 and 1994, said in an interview.

<snip>

By avoiding reporting his canceled casino debt in the first place, however, Mr. Trump’s $916 million deduction would not have been reduced by hundreds of millions of dollars. He could have preserved the deduction and used it instead to avoid paying income taxes he might otherwise have owed on books, TV shows or branding deals. Under the rules in effect in 1995, the $916 million loss could have been used to wipe out more than $50 million a year in taxable income for 18 years.

<snip>

Mr. Trump financed his three Atlantic City gambling resorts with $1.3 billion in debt, most of it in the form of high interest junk bonds. By late 1990, after months of escalating operating losses, New Jersey casino regulators were warning that “a complete financial collapse of the Trump Organization was not out of the question.” By 1992, all three casinos had filed for bankruptcy, and bondholders were ultimately forced to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to salvage at least part of their investment.

<snip>

It is unclear who first glimpsed a way for Mr. Trump to dodge a huge tax bill. But the basic maneuver he used was essentially a new twist on a contentious strategy corporations had been using for years to avoid taxes created by canceled debt.

The strategy, known among tax practitioners as a “stock-for-debt swap,” relies on mathematical sleight of hand. Say a company can repay only $60 million of a $100 million bank loan. If the bank forgives the remaining $40 million, the company faces a large tax bill because it will have to report that canceled $40 million debt as taxable income.

Clever tax lawyers found a way around this inconvenience. The company would simply swap stock for the $40 million in debt it could not repay. This way, it would look as if the entire $100 million loan had been repaid, and presto: There would be no tax bill due for $40 million in canceled debt.

Best of all, it did not matter if the actual market value of the stock was considerably less than the $40 million in canceled debt. (Stock in an effectively insolvent company could easily be next to worthless.) Even in the opaque, rarefied world of gaming impenetrable tax regulations, this particular maneuver was about as close as a company could get to waving a magic wand and making taxes disappear.

Alarmed by the obvious potential for abuse, Congress and the I.R.S. made repeated efforts during the 1980s to curb this brand of tax wizardry before banning its use by corporations altogether in 1993. But while policy makers were busy trying to stop corporations from using this particular ploy, the endlessly creative club of elite tax advisers was inventing a new way to circumvent the ban, this time through the use of partnerships.

This was the twist that was especially beneficial to Mr. Trump. Wealthy families like the Trumps often own real estate and other assets through partnerships rather than corporations. Mr. Trump, for example, owned all three of his Atlantic City casinos through partnerships, an arrangement that allowed casino profits to flow directly to his personal tax returns when times were good.

But what if times were bad? What if Mr. Trump’s casino partnerships could not repay hundreds of millions of dollars they owed to bondholders? And what if the bondholders were persuaded to forgive this debt? Wouldn’t that force the partnerships — i.e., Mr. Trump — to report hundreds of millions of dollars of taxable income in the form of canceled debt?

Enter the tax advisers with their audacious plan: Why not eliminate all that taxable income from canceled debt by swapping “partnership equity” for debt in exactly the same way corporations had been swapping company stock for debt?

True enough, the I.R.S. and Congress had clearly signaled their disapproval of the basic concept. Fred T. Goldberg, who was the I.R.S. commissioner under George Bush, recalled in an interview that the I.R.S. frowned on partnership equity-for-debt swaps for the same reason it objected to corporate stock-for-debt swaps. “The fiction is that the partnership interest has the same value as the debt,” he said. Lee A. Sheppard, a contributing editor to Tax Notes, wrote in 1991 that trying to find a legal justification for this tactic was akin to proving “the existence of the Loch Ness monster.”

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump boasts of his mastery of tax loopholes and claims no other candidate for the White House has ever known more about the tax code. This background, he argues with evident disgust, gives him special insight into the way wealthy elites buy off politicians and hire high-priced lawyers and accountants to rig the tax system — just as, he claims, they rig elections.

That insight was on display in 1991 and 1992 when he was laying the groundwork to make a multimillion-dollar tax bill disappear.

Before proceeding with his plan, Mr. Trump did what most prudent taxpayers do: He sought a formal tax opinion letter. Such letters, typically written by highly paid lawyers who spend entire careers mastering the roughly 10,000 pages of ever-changing statutes that make up the United States tax code, can provide important protection to taxpayers. As long as a tax adviser blesses a particular tax strategy in a formal opinion letter, the taxpayer most likely will not face penalties even if the I.R.S. ultimately rules the strategy was improper.

The language used in tax opinion letters has a specialized meaning understood by all tax professionals. So, for example, when a tax lawyer writes that a shelter is “more likely than not” going to be approved by the I.R.S., this means there is at least a 51 percent chance the shelter will withstand scrutiny. (This is known as an “M.L.T.N.” letter in the vernacular of tax lawyers.) A “should” letter means there is about a 75 percent chance the I.R.S. will not object. The gold standard, a “will” letter, means the I.R.S. is all but certain to bless the tax avoidance strategy.

But the opinion letters Mr. Trump received from his tax lawyers at Willkie Farr & Gallagher were far from the gold standard. The letters bluntly warned that there was no statute, regulation or judicial opinion that explicitly permitted Mr. Trump’s tax gambit. “Due to the lack of definitive judicial or administrative authority,” his lawyers wrote, “substantial uncertainties exist with respect to many of the tax consequences of the plan.”

<snip>

One letter, 25 pages long, analyzed seven distinct components of Mr. Trump’s proposed tax maneuver. It found only “substantial authority” for six of the components. In the stilted language of tax opinion letters, the phrase “substantial authority” is a red flag that the lawyers believe the I.R.S. can be expected to rule against the taxpayer roughly two-thirds of the time. In other words, Mr. Trump’s tax lawyers were telling him there were at least six different reasons the I.R.S. would probably cry foul if he were audited. In anticipation of that possibility, the lawyers even laid out a fallback plan that would have allowed Mr. Trump to spread the pain of a large tax hit over many years if the I.R.S. ultimately balked.

It is unclear whether the I.R.S. ever challenged Mr. Trump’s use of this specific tax maneuver. According to a financial disclosure statement prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants, he was under audit by the tax authorities as of 1993, only a year after he avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income because of this legally suspect tactic. But the results of that audit are unknown, and the agency declined to comment on Monday.

Regardless of whether the I.R.S. objected, Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance in this case violated a central principle of American tax law, said Mr. Buckley, the former chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, who later served as chief tax counsel for Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.

“He deducted somebody else’s losses,” Mr. Buckley said. By that, Mr. Buckley meant that only the bondholders who forgave Mr. Trump’s unpaid casino debts should have been allowed to use those losses to offset future income and reduce their taxes. That Mr. Trump used the same losses to reduce his taxes ultimately increases the tax burden on everyone else, Mr. Buckley explained. “He is double dipping big time.”

In any event, Mr. Trump can no longer benefit from the same maneuver. Just as Congress acted in 1993 to ban stock-for-debt swaps by corporations, it acted in 2004 to ban equity-for-debt swaps by partnerships.

<snip>
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Double Dipper Trump Used Legally

Note the language of this special little snowflake? While I was over in Saudi Arabia, making obscene profits working for Bill Clintons government repairing SA's Air Force without paying taxes, I found out that I could save even more taxes(which is legal theft of working people) by using my personal deductions of $10,000 to burn off capital gains of stocks I owned. My wife asked if this was legal, and I told her as long as it is on the 1040's it was legal as hell. I must really piss off you liberals (who don't pay taxes on welfare) because I Double Dipped Using Legal means to "Cheat" the government out of my hard earned money, so it wouldn't end up in your welfare check. Maybe you might want to vote for Trump who wants to do away with all these liberal loopholes and get a more just Tax System. How stupid you liberals are when your own political elites make those loopholes so liberal people like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Jeff Imelt and Bill Clinton and his wife, can avoid paying taxes. Bunch off dumbasses you liberals are.

 

[Iceweasel]

.Double Dipper Trump Used Legally Dubious Method To Avoid Paying Taxes.

If he broke some laws post them up so we can learn something useful. If tax laws are unfair we need to change them, maybe throw the bums out that wrote the laws, not blame the law abiding citizens.

What's wrong with you lefties? You live in a bizarre bubble world.

 

[SassyIrishLass]

Legally being the keyword here

 

[hadit]

Remember, as we have learned, the standard is conviction in a court of law and prison time. Short of that, no one has done anything wrong.

 

[Star]

Legally being the keyword here

Wrong, the key word here is dubious (if Trump released his taxes, he'd probably be in jail - golden letters or not.) because, now that the underfunded IRS has been alerted to Trump's dodge it's doubtful the IRS will simply pocket that info.

It's not likely the IRS will take any action during campaign (it's government policy, except for Jim Comey who plays by his own rules) season but... But Trump walked a legal tightrope and according to many tax experts Trump stepped over the line but because of several letters that were sent to the IRS by Trump's paid tax lawyers - apparently that's all it takes (I've done that myself) even at the billionaire level where the tax dodge by Trump was in the 10's possibly 100's of millions of dollars in revenue that had to be made up by other people paying more or-----or the federal government having to borrow more and more money from overseas sources.

But my questions are; is Trump still clipping coupons from his 1994 tax dodge? Was Trump still cashing in after the law was changed (Hillary voted for the change) in 2004? Even if Trump is able to skate on the legal technicalities of the tax code, will Trump's creditors and partners that got screwed in Trump's 1994 tax dodge be able to sue for damages from Trump's manipulation of the tax code? Was Lyin' Trump lying when he said he's been audited 12 years in row?


Trump's tax dodge skirted the edge of the law, report says
Seema Mehta

At a time when Donald Trump’s casinos were bleeding money and he was badly in debt, the Republican presidential nominee used a “legally dubious” accounting maneuver to avoid reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in income, according to a New York Times report Monday.

In the early 1990s, Trump convinced financial backers to forgive large debts he could not repay, the paper wrote. But he avoided having to report the canceled debts as income because he gave the backers equity in his partnerships that owned the casinos, effectively writing off the income.

Trump’s attorneys advised him at the time that if he were audited, the Internal Revenue Service would not look favorably upon the tactic, the paper reported. In 2004, Congress voted to outlaw the practice. Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton was among those who voted to close the loophole.

Trump declined to comment on the report, and his spokeswoman Hope Hicks dismissed it as “either a fundamental misunderstanding or an intentional misreading of the law.”

The Times wrote that it discovered the tax gambit while combing through casino bankruptcy filings. The newspaper posted on its website “tax opinion letters” Trump obtained from his attorneys about the maneuvers.

On the campaign trail, Trump has bragged about his ability to use tax loopholes and said his knowledge of the flaws in the tax structure made him the most capable to fix it.

But Trump's claims about his taxes and income are not independently verifiable because he has refused to release his tax returns, bucking four decades of practice among presidential nominees.

<snip>

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[AnCap'n_Murica]

"Legally dubious methods" = I don't like it, even though it's totally legal.

 

[EvilCat Breath]

Trump obeyed the law .

There's a road to ruin if I ever saw one.

 

[SassyIrishLass]

Legally being the keyword here

Wrong, the key word here is dubious (if Trump released his taxes, he'd probably be in jail - golden letters or not.) because, now that the underfunded IRS has been alerted to Trump's dodge it's doubtful the IRS will simply pocket that info.

It's not likely the IRS will take any action during campaign (it's government policy, except for Jim Comey who plays by his own rules) season but... But Trump walked a legal tightrope and according to many tax experts Trump stepped over the line but because of several letters that were sent to the IRS by Trump's paid tax lawyers - apparently that's all it takes (I've done that myself) even at the billionaire level where the tax dodge by Trump was in the 10's possibly 100's of millions of dollars in revenue that had to be made up by other people paying more or-----or the federal government having to borrow more and more money from overseas sources.

But my questions are; is Trump still clipping coupons from his 1994 tax dodge? Was Trump still cashing in after the law was changed (Hillary voted for the change) in 2004? Even if Trump is able to skate on the legal technicalities of the tax code, will Trump's creditors and partners that got screwed in Trump's 1994 tax dodge be able to sue for damages from Trump's manipulation of the tax code? Was Lyin' Trump lying when he said he's been audited 12 years in row?


Trump's tax dodge skirted the edge of the law, report says
Seema Mehta

At a time when Donald Trump’s casinos were bleeding money and he was badly in debt, the Republican presidential nominee used a “legally dubious” accounting maneuver to avoid reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in income, according to a New York Times report Monday.

In the early 1990s, Trump convinced financial backers to forgive large debts he could not repay, the paper wrote. But he avoided having to report the canceled debts as income because he gave the backers equity in his partnerships that owned the casinos, effectively writing off the income.

Trump’s attorneys advised him at the time that if he were audited, the Internal Revenue Service would not look favorably upon the tactic, the paper reported. In 2004, Congress voted to outlaw the practice. Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton was among those who voted to close the loophole.

Trump declined to comment on the report, and his spokeswoman Hope Hicks dismissed it as “either a fundamental misunderstanding or an intentional misreading of the law.”

The Times wrote that it discovered the tax gambit while combing through casino bankruptcy filings. The newspaper posted on its website “tax opinion letters” Trump obtained from his attorneys about the maneuvers.

On the campaign trail, Trump has bragged about his ability to use tax loopholes and said his knowledge of the flaws in the tax structure made him the most capable to fix it.

But Trump's claims about his taxes and income are not independently verifiable because he has refused to release his tax returns, bucking four decades of practice among presidential nominees.

<snip>

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Was it legal or not? Sit down

 

[Star]

Legally being the keyword here

Wrong, the key word here is dubious (if Trump released his taxes, he'd probably be in jail - golden letters or not.) because, now that the underfunded IRS has been alerted to Trump's dodge it's doubtful the IRS will simply pocket that info.

It's not likely the IRS will take any action during campaign (it's government policy, except for Jim Comey who plays by his own rules) season but... But Trump walked a legal tightrope and according to many tax experts Trump stepped over the line but because of several letters that were sent to the IRS by Trump's paid tax lawyers - apparently that's all it takes (I've done that myself) even at the billionaire level where the tax dodge by Trump was in the 10's possibly 100's of millions of dollars in revenue that had to be made up by other people paying more or-----or the federal government having to borrow more and more money from overseas sources.

But my questions are; is Trump still clipping coupons from his 1994 tax dodge? Was Trump still cashing in after the law was changed (Hillary voted for the change) in 2004? Even if Trump is able to skate on the legal technicalities of the tax code, will Trump's creditors and partners that got screwed in Trump's 1994 tax dodge be able to sue for damages from Trump's manipulation of the tax code? Was Lyin' Trump lying when he said he's been audited 12 years in row?


Trump's tax dodge skirted the edge of the law, report says
Seema Mehta

At a time when Donald Trump’s casinos were bleeding money and he was badly in debt, the Republican presidential nominee used a “legally dubious” accounting maneuver to avoid reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in income, according to a New York Times report Monday.

In the early 1990s, Trump convinced financial backers to forgive large debts he could not repay, the paper wrote. But he avoided having to report the canceled debts as income because he gave the backers equity in his partnerships that owned the casinos, effectively writing off the income.

Trump’s attorneys advised him at the time that if he were audited, the Internal Revenue Service would not look favorably upon the tactic, the paper reported. In 2004, Congress voted to outlaw the practice. Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton was among those who voted to close the loophole.

Trump declined to comment on the report, and his spokeswoman Hope Hicks dismissed it as “either a fundamental misunderstanding or an intentional misreading of the law.”

The Times wrote that it discovered the tax gambit while combing through casino bankruptcy filings. The newspaper posted on its website “tax opinion letters” Trump obtained from his attorneys about the maneuvers.

On the campaign trail, Trump has bragged about his ability to use tax loopholes and said his knowledge of the flaws in the tax structure made him the most capable to fix it.

But Trump's claims about his taxes and income are not independently verifiable because he has refused to release his tax returns, bucking four decades of practice among presidential nominees.

<snip>

.

Was it legal or not? Sit down

Earlier in this thread I asked if rightwingers/Republicans believed Lyin' Trump when he told you he'd been audited every year for 12 years, but as usual, rightwingers/Republicans were to cowardly to answer - so here it is TRUMP LIED TO YOU. If Trump's 1994 taxes had been audited... ☞ "Donald Trump avoided paying taxes in the early 1990s by using a maneuver that was frowned upon and would have likely been overruled by the IRS in an audit, according to a new report."

The answer to your hastily crafted, thoughtless question is yes Trump likely broke the law but he wasn't caught by the underfunded-understaffed IRS and ripped the American people off of 10's possibly 100's of millions of dollars, then ☞ 8 years after Trump ripped the American people off for 10's possibly 100's of millions of dollars, American GI's were scrounging around in Iraqi garbage dumps for anything that could be used as armor - see how tax dodging works?

"He deducted somebody else's losses," John Buckley, the chief of staff for the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation in 1993 and 1994, told the Times. "He is double dipping big time."​

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[edthecynic]

But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.

So?

So obviously he WASN'T audited then and isn't now being audited.

 

[owebo]

But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.

So?

So obviously he WASN'T audited then and isn't now being audited.

Only to you double digit IQ'ers.....

 

[Norman]

"Legally dubious tax avoidance schemes"

That's an oxymoron right there. You are grasping at straws. What desperate idiot...

 

[edthecynic]

But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.

So?

So obviously he WASN'T audited then and isn't now being audited.

Only to you double digit IQ'ers.....

You single digit IQ'ers are just jealous.

 

[Missouri_Mike]

How is something legally dubious? If it's legal it's by nature not dubious.

 

[007]

.


Double Dipper Trump Used Legally Dubious Method To Avoid Paying Taxes




Donald Trump is nothing if not a shyster.
In a nutshell, what Trump did to avoid paying taxes for 18 years is borrow money from banks and partners then-----then when his business went south he wrote off money that wasn't his as losses leaving his debtors holding the bag while simultaneously avoiding paying his fair share of taxes. It's more complicated than that but the above is a good start - the IRS needs 10,000 pages of tax legalese and Trump needs an army of lawyers to explain Trump's legally dubious tax avoidance scheme(s). See article below:


Donald Trump Used Legally Dubious Method to Avoid Paying Taxes

By DAVID BARSTOW, MIKE McINTIRE, PATRICIA COHEN, SUSANNE CRAIG and RUSS BUETTNER
OCT. 31, 2016

Donald J. Trump proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime in federal income taxes for years on end. He insists he merely exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire — loopholes he says Hillary Clinton failed to close during her years in the United States Senate. “Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I couldn’t use them?” Mr. Trump asked during a campaign rally last month.
But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.
\

"DUBIOUS".... ... is dubious illegal?