Federal prosecutors announced charges Friday against a contractor with the Internal Revenue Service who allegedly stole the tax returns of a high-ranking government official. A source familiar with the matter told CNN that official is former President Donald Trump.
Yep, Trump showed how much of the government actually runs on norms and traditions instead of actual laws. Even some of the laws that he did break (like the Presidential Records Act) don’t actually specify penalties because Congress assumed it wasn’t necessary.
The funny thing is, his tax returns were fairly unremarkable. I’m a cpa and my background is largely with high and ultra high net worth individuals and their businesses, so people like trump are my bread and butter. I reviewed his returns when they first leaked and honestly nothing jumped out at me as particularly noteworthy or interesting at all. All I can speculate is that he’s just a stubborn asshole and simply didn’t want to release them.
I always thought the big “issue” people were expecting wasnt that the tax returns were going to show anything illegal or noteworthy, but rather they would instead just show that he is worth way less than he goes around claiming.
There was a lot of speculation about that but I’m not sure if there’s any consensus. Individual tax returns only show income, and business returns only show book values (not fair market value which would help determine wealth). He had pretty big net operating loss carryovers from previous years which essentially zeroed out his income for a few years, so it’s hard to say. I feel like I remember looking for foreign account disclosures but didn’t see them in the returns, which would be at least one set of FMV numbers to go with. It’s been a while since I looked though. Overall I walked away being disappointed so I’ll stick with my original assessment, maybe I take another look later today though.