Double Dipper Trump Used Legally Dubious Method To Avoid Paying Taxes

[Snouter]

Even the "experts" that the qu33rs on CNN/MSNBC on their witch hunt interview in regards to real estate development and taxes say every real estate developer back in the day did their taxes the same way. The crazy concept being to keep as much of the money you make as possible! There is nothing more American than keeping the fucking money you make, keeping the property you own, etc., but enter Crooked Hillary and we all have to share. Crooked Hillary, the most corrupt politician in world history, and her MSM, the most corrupt propaganda source in world history, have the chutzpah to imply one should hand the government their hard earned money beyond what is required by law and if they don't they are not patriotic. Nobody is buying the democrat bullshit except low info retards.

 

[Claudette]

.


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.
\

Nope. What he did was one hundred percent legal.

That law has since been changed so it doesn't happen again.

 

[AvgGuyIA]

.


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.
\

Next April, I want you to take no deductions or credits on your taxes. mr Trump didn't violate any tax law on the books.

 

[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>

.

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."​

.

Ya know some Cankle supporter should be the last one wailing about "dubious"....nuff said ya partisan shill

 

[easyt65]

'Trump used LEGAL methods...'

'Nuff said...thanks, libs.

 

[Hutch Starskey]

Trump obeyed the law .

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

That's a pretty bold statement to make when no one has seen them let alone scrutinized them.

 

[mudwhistle]

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.

I'm sure you can add every nasty accusation you can dream up, but it doesn't change the fact that you're full of poop.

 

[mudwhistle]

'Trump used LEGAL methods...'

'Nuff said...thanks, libs.

Legal and smart.

 

[Iceweasel]

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..

They've been auditing him for many years, you goddamn retard.

 

[martybegan]

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>

.

So the IRS didn't review a massive write-off by a known outlandish billionaire?

and your statement "If he released the returns he'd be in jail" is idiotic, the returns GO TO THE IRS!. If they would have found an issue, don't you think he would have been investigated DECADES ago?

This is simply your side not being able to find anything illegal in what he did, so you have to go with flim-flammery to try to equate the legal things he did with something criminal.

 

[Mikeoxenormous]

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>

.

now that the underfunded IRS

Maybe if IRS would do their fucking job and not waste money, they wouldn't be underfunded. You libtards are the stupidest people in the universe.

Taxpayer money finances IRS "Star Trek" parody - CBS News

Thus begins a six-minute "Star Trek" parody starring IRS employees and paid for with your tax dollars. It's not likely to go over well with some Americans and members of Congress, especially since federal agencies have been complaining that it's difficult to find trims under forced sequestration.

 

[easyt65]

'Trump used LEGAL methods...'

'Nuff said...thanks, libs.

Legal and smart.

Libs can't comprehend doing things the LEGAL way...

 

[mudwhistle]

'Trump used LEGAL methods...'

'Nuff said...thanks, libs.

Legal and smart.

Libs can't comprehend doing things the LEGAL way...

What libs do is criminalize legal activity while minimizing their own nefarious activities.

 

[hadit]

.


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?

The only way it can be is if tax law is written in such a way as to contradict itself and leave various actions open to interpretation. We wouldn't have that going on, would we?

 

[easyt65]

Hillary is under 2 seperate FBI investigations for fraud, perjury, bribery, security violations, espionage, perjury, etc...and Liberals are complaining about how Trump legally lowered the amount of taxes he had to pay...

 

[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>

.

So the IRS didn't review a massive write-off by a known outlandish billionaire?

and your statement "If he released the returns he'd be in jail" is idiotic, the returns GO TO THE IRS!. If they would have found an issue, don't you think he would have been investigated DECADES ago?

This is simply your side not being able to find anything illegal in what he did, so you have to go with flim-flammery to try to equate the legal things he did with something criminal.

There's no rule on the USMB that says you have to believe me but since you're defending Trump, listen to Trumps own words, he confessed that he scammed (my word) the IRS and he and he alone can fix it.

How did Trump get away with ripping off the IRS...
Because the IRS is underfunded and therefore understaffed if you're a rich guy you can hire a (or an army of) high powered expert tax-lawyer to write a golden letter to the IRS and because the IRS doesn't have the resources to audit every red flag, the IRS almost always take the "tax experts" (hired guns) word for it - I've used this same tactic myself, on a much smaller scale, of course. When I got flagged for a questionable deduction which my accountant said would go thru with no problem, I took my letter from the IRS to my accountant, my accountant said he would handle it by writing a "gold standard" letter...
I didn't hear another word about it - bing-bang-boom---done.

<snip>

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.

<snip>
.

 

[Two Thumbs]

.


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.
\

hillary donates money to herself for a tax write off then signs her own paycheck.

but you don't care b/c 10 years ago trump....

 

[KissMy]

Tax Loopholes for Billionaires Kill the Economy & Jobs!

 

[martybegan]

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>

.

So the IRS didn't review a massive write-off by a known outlandish billionaire?

and your statement "If he released the returns he'd be in jail" is idiotic, the returns GO TO THE IRS!. If they would have found an issue, don't you think he would have been investigated DECADES ago?

This is simply your side not being able to find anything illegal in what he did, so you have to go with flim-flammery to try to equate the legal things he did with something criminal.

There's no rule on the USMB that says you have to believe me but since you're defending Trump, listen to Trumps own words, he confessed that he scammed (my word) the IRS and he and he alone can fix it.

How did Trump get away with ripping off the IRS...
Because the IRS is underfunded and therefore understaffed if you're a rich guy you can hire a (or an army of) high powered expert tax-lawyer to write a golden letter to the IRS and because the IRS doesn't have the resources to audit every red flag, the IRS almost always take the "tax experts" (hired guns) word for it - I've used this same tactic myself, on a much smaller scale, of course. When I got flagged for a questionable deduction which my accountant said would go thru with no problem, I took my letter from the IRS to my accountant, my accountant said he would handle it by writing a "gold standard" letter...
I didn't hear another word about it - bing-bang-boom---done.

<snip>

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.

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Your wall of text does nothing to change the fact that what he did was legal. If he really was doing something illegal to the tune of millions of dollars, you don't think SOME part of the IRS would be gunning for him? If they found him criminally at fault they could have seized his ALL his assets, and that would have covered a lot of IRS expenses into plenty of other investigations.

You are grasping at Straws.

And I do not support Trump, I detest Hillary. It will be hold my nose time when I enter the voting booth.

 

[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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hillary donates money to herself for a tax write off then signs her own paycheck.

but you don't care b/c 10 years ago trump....

* Which "donates" are you talking about?
* Which "tax write off" are you talking about?
* What "paycheck" are you talking about?

Don't be askered to be specific, the worst that will happen to you is someone on the USMB will prove you wrong. Only thin-skinned, egotists, etc. are afraid of being called out on a message board - so quit posting BS and get specific - can we talk?

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