An exclusive investigation into a decade of previously unreleased tax returns for President Donald Trump showed his businesses claimed $1.17 billion in losses from 1985 to 1994, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
"The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings," the Times reported from printouts of Trump's 1040 official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts. "They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.
"In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the IRS compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years."
During that decade of "fevered acquisition and spectacular collapse," according to the Times report, President Trump avoided paying any income tax for eight of those 10 years.
The Times obtained the figures from an anonymous source who had legal access to the data.
"The president got massive depreciation and tax shelter because of large-scale construction and subsidized developments," a senior official told the Times in a statement weeks ago. "That is why the president has always scoffed at the tax system and said you need to change the tax laws. You can make a large income and not have to pay large amount of taxes."
A lawyer for the president, when contacted by the Times, wrote the information was "demonstrably false," and added Tuesday before publication of the report: "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."
The report comes in the wake of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin's rejection of a House Ways and Means Committee's request for President Trump's tax returns.
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