Report: Trump tax info shows he regularly lost more money than nearly any other American taxpayer
Tax information obtained by The New York Times shows that from 1985 to 1994, President Trump's businesses lost more than $1 billion — so much that he did not have to pay income taxes for eight of the 10 years.
The Times received printouts of Trump's Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with figures from his 1040 forms, from someone who has legal access to them. Every year, the IRS releases information compiled from a sampling of high-income earners, and the Times discovered upon comparison that "year after year," Trump "appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer."
In 1990 and 1991, Trump reported losses of more than $250 million each year, indicating that his core business losses "were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the IRS information for those years," the Times reports. Trump, who has long boasted about his business acumen, has not released his tax returns like every other president has over the last 40 years.
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The House Ways and Means Committee has asked for the last six years of Trump's business and personal tax returns, but Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Monday announced the documents will not be turned over, despite the committee chair's legal authority. A lawyer for Trump, Charles J. Harder, told the Times that IRS transcripts "particularly before the days of electronic filing, are notoriously inaccurate" and "would not be able to provide a reasonable picture of any taxpayer's return." Read more at The New York Times.
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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