A court has ordered The Trump Organization to pay $1.6 million after being convicted of payroll-tax fraud last December in New York state.
While the fine is the maximum allowed under state law, the fine is less than the millions the company allegedly saved by paying its executives off-the-book perks like luxury cars and apartments, Insider reported.
“I want to be very clear, we don’t think that is enough,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said of the state’s maximum fines for financial fraud. “Our laws in this state need to change in order to capture this type of decade-plus, systemic, egregious fraud.”
Even Judge Juan Merchan acknowledged that the fine “may have limited impact on a multibillion corporation,” according to the New York Times.
During the trial, defense attorneys claimed that Trump family members at the top of the company were completely clueless about the organization’s financial misdealings.
The Trump Organization’s ex-CFO Allen Weisselberg essentially took the fall for the misdeeds and was sentenced to five months in Riker’s Island prison and a $2 million fine as a result.
The organization’s attorneys have pledged to appeal the decision. However, Trump himself may find himself in hot water if prosecutors determined that he cheated on his past taxes, which were released just two weeks ago.
In late December, the House House Ways and Means Committee released Trump’s tax returns from 2015 through 2020. In three of the six years, Trump’s taxable income was zero. This means he paid no income tax in three of the years, and just $750 in 2016.
Investigative financial journalist David Cay Johnston wrote that Trump definitely cheated on his taxes, lowering his owed income taxes by claiming “huge business expenses despite having zero revenue.” Trump also did this in his 1984 tax return, resulting in two judges ruling that he had committed civil tax fraud, Johnston noted.
“That Trump persisted in using the same fraudulent technique in six years of recent tax returns is powerful evidence of mens rea or criminal intent,” the reporter wrote. “This device is not Trump’s most lucrative tax cheating technique, but it is the easiest for jurors to understand should Trump be indicted on tax charges.”
Greater scrutiny of Trump’s taxes could find that he committed other shady dealings “including charitable deductions that may be bogus or overstated; treating personal expenses as business expenses; loans to his three older children that may be to escape gift taxes; and reporting almost $5 million of capital contributions as tax-deductible business expenses,” Johnston wrote.
Because there’s no statute of limitations on civil tax fraud, Trump could eventually be pursued for back-owed taxes even if he’s never indicted for fraud.