A big secret is now slowly being revealed: initial reports on ex-US President Trump's tax documents show that despite sales in the millions, he hardly paid any income tax. In four of the last six years, extensive write-downs resulted in negative income.
Former US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania have reported negative adjusted gross income for four of the six years from 2015 to 2020. As per the couple's tax filings released by Congress, their unadjusted gross income was $53.2 million. According to this, Trump only had to pay $4.4 million in federal taxes in six years. In a narrower definition, there were only 1.8 million.
Previous tax returns released by the New York Times (NYT) suggest the Trumps are still carrying net operating losses from 2008 and 2009. The documents that Congress has now released suggest that by 2018 those losses were entirely gone. In 2018, Trump again reported an adjusted gross income of more than $24 million - and paid almost $1 million in taxes. According to the NYT, the positive result is mainly due to sales of real estate and investments, which alone are said to have brought $22 million into his coffers.
The Trumps reported millions of dollars in income each year in the form of interest, dividends, capital gains and other forms of income, but this was more than offset by losses most years, including significant losses reported under "other income" and on rental properties, partnerships and others Income was reported in Appendix E of the tax return.
The new details on Trump's taxes come from two reports released by the House Ways and Means Committee late Tuesday, according to the NYT. The committee had fought a legal battle to get the records from the Internal Revenue Service, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. The reports contain the summary of the committee's findings, but not the tax returns, which are due to be released in the coming days.
According to the NYT, the data that has now been published complement the picture that the newspaper compiled two years ago. At the time, an analysis of Trump's tax records spanning some two decades revealed that while the hundreds of companies belonging to his empire raked in enormous revenues, he still made massive losses that he used to avoid taxes.
