The US President’s tax returns have been the subject of controversy since he initially announced he would release them while running for office. During the pre-election campaign, he promised to make them known, which has never happened.
ProPublica’s findings, therefore, provide a rare glimpse into the sought-after documents.
The differences ProPublica discovered are “versions of fraud,” Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley, told the outlet. “This kind of stuff is not OK.”
Trump allegedly informed a lender that he took in twice as much rent from one building as he reported to tax authorities during the same year, 2017. There were also discrepancies in occupancy figures and expenses.
ProPublica pointed out that former Trump associates Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort are serving prison time for offenses including falsifying tax and bank records. Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, has previously accused Trump of manipulating numbers on his tax and loan documents.
Experts that ProPublica spoke with noted that there “can be legitimate reasons for numbers to differ between tax and loan documents, but some of the gaps seemed to have no reasonable justification.”
The president’s tax returns and those of his businesses are a frequent target of investigations. Earlier this month, a federal judge dismissed President Trump’s lawsuit seeking to block the release of his personal and corporate tax returns to the Manhattan district attorney.
