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Trump earned US$153m and paid US$36.5m in taxes in 2005

WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump earned US$153 million (S$216.2 million) and paid US$36.5 million in income taxes in 2005, paying a roughly 25 per cent effective tax rate thanks to a tax he has since sought to eliminate, according to highly sought-after newly-disclosed tax documents.

US President Donald Trump looks up while hosting a House and Senate leadership lunch at the White House in Washington on March 1, 2017. Photo: Reuters

US President Donald Trump looks up while hosting a House and Senate leadership lunch at the White House in Washington on March 1, 2017. Photo: Reuters

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WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump earned US$153 million (S$216.2 million) and paid US$36.5 million in income taxes in 2005, paying a roughly 25 per cent effective tax rate thanks to a tax he has since sought to eliminate, according to highly sought-after newly-disclosed tax documents.

The pages from Mr Trump’s federal tax return show the then-real estate mogul also reported a business loss of US$103 million that year, although the documents don’t provide detail. The forms show that Mr Trump paid an effective tax rate of 24.5 per cent, a figure well above the roughly 10 per cent the average American taxpayer forks over each year, but below the 27.4 per cent that taxpayers earning US$1 million a year average were paying at the time, according to data from the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

The tax forms were obtained by journalist David Cay Johnston, who runs a website called DCReport.org, and reported on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. Johnston, who has long reported on tax issues, said he received the documents in the mail, unsolicited.

Mr Trump’s hefty business loss appears to be a continued benefit from his use of a tax loophole in the 1990s, which allowed him to deduct previous losses in future years. In 1995, Mr Trump reported a loss of more than US$900 million, largely as a result of financial turmoil at his casinos.

Tax records obtained by The New York Times last year showed the losses were so large they could have allowed Mr Trump to avoid paying taxes for up to 18 years. But Mr Trump’s 2005 filing shows that another tax prevented him from realising the full benefit of those deductions.

The bulk of Mr Trump’s tax bill that year was due to the Alternative Minimum Tax, a tax aimed at preventing high-income earners from paying minimal taxes.

The AMT requires many taxpayers to calculate their taxes twice, once under the rules for regular income tax and then again under AMT, and then pay the higher amount. Critics say the tax has ensnared more middle-class people than intended, raising what they owe the federal government each year.

Were it not for the AMT, Mr Trump would have avoided all but a few million dollars of his 2005 tax bill.

Mr Trump’s campaign website called for the end of the AMT, which is expected to bring in more than US$350 billion in revenues from 2016 to 2025.

As a candidate and as president, Mr Trump has refused to release his tax returns, breaking a decades-long tradition. Although he initially promised to do so, he later claimed he was under audit by the Internal Revenue Service and said his attorneys had advised against it, though experts and IRS officials said such audits don’t bar taxpayers from releasing their returns.

The White House pushed back even before the release of the documents on Tuesday night (March 14), saying that publishing the information was illegal.

“You know you are desperate for ratings when you are willing to violate the law to push a story about two pages of tax returns from over a decade ago,” the White House said in a statement issued on condition that it be attributed to an anonymous official, although the president has decried the use of anonymous sources.

The unauthorised release or publishing of federal tax returns is a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to US$5,000 and up to five years in jail. But Mr Maddow argued that MSNBC was exercising its First Amendment right to publish information in the public interest.

Mr Trump long insisted the American public wasn’t interested in his returns and said little could be learned from them. But Mr Trump’s full returns would contain key details about things like his charitable giving, his income sources, the type of deductions he claimed, how much he earned from his assets and what strategies Mr Trump used to reduce his tax bill.

The issue was a major point of attack from his election rival Hillary Clinton, who suggested Mr Trump had something to hide.

The White House has not said whether or not the president plans to release his returns while he’s in office. More than 1 million people have signed a White House petition urging the president to release them. AP

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