U.S. President Donald Trump did not pay any federal income tax in 10 out of the 15 years before he was elected president in 2016, which was made possible because he reported substantial net losses from his business enterprises, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
Through the two years following that, the tax-return data obtained by the Times showed Trump paid only 750 U.S. dollars in federal income taxes, despite receiving hundreds of millions dollars in revenue from his entertainment businesses as well as other deals.
The Times report revealed meticulously the details of more than two decades of Trump's tax information, which it said painted him as "a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes."
In response to the Times' account, Trump dismissed it as "fake news" and claimed he pays "a lot" in both state and federal income taxes.
Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, claimed the Times' findings were "mostly, if not all, inaccurate."
"Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015," Garten said in a statement.
According to the report, Trump used the 427.4 million dollars he was paid for a reality TV program to fund his other businesses, mostly his golf courses, and was taking out less cash than he was putting in businesses.
The former businessman failed to release his tax returns when he was running for president and has consistently refused to give in even when political pressure heaped on him, which constitutes a full departure from common practice by U.S. presidential nominees.
Defending those decisions, the president said an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audit on his finances is preventing him from doing so. Once the agency is off his back, he will no longer keep his records private, Trump added. However, being subject to audit does not oblige one to hold tax returns, despite Trump's repeated claims otherwise.
At the center of the decade-long IRS investigation is a 72.9 million dollars tax refund that Trump claimed and received after declaring huge losses, the Times reported, adding that if the audit is to determine that his claim for the refund was not legitimate, it would cost him more than 100 million dollars.
Also hanging over Trump's head is a legal battle initiated by New York City prosecutors and congressional Democrats who are seeking to obtain his returns.
By offering specific examples, the Times report also indicated that there may be potential conflicts of interests between Trump's current position and his businesses.
In the first two years of being president, Trump has obtained an overseas profit of 73 million dollars, with much of that coming from his golf courses but some from licensing deals in countries including the Philippines, India and Turkey, the report said.
The explosive disclosure of previously private tax information came at the height of a heated campaign battle between Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Democrats were quick to seize on the report to portray Trump as a tax dodger and raise questions about his carefully groomed image as a savvy businessman.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer took to Twitter to ask Americans to raise their hands if they paid more in federal income tax than Trump.
"You have in Donald Trump a President who spends his time thinking about how he can work his way out of paying taxes, of meeting the obligation that every other working person in this country meets every year," said Kate Bedingfield, Biden's deputy campaign manager, on a CNN show.
"With Joe Biden, you have somebody who has a completely different perspective on what it means to be a working family in this country."