Which is the Trump Foundation's Bigger Crime, Self-Dealing or Keeping it a Secret?

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Which is the Trump Foundation's Bigger Crime, Self-Dealing or Keeping it a Secret?

By Stuart Gibson, - NOV 28, 2016 @ 09:08 AM

OK – I admit it. I hold a bias in favor of law enforcement, particularly when it comes to taxes. Thirty years of litigating civil tax cases for the U.S. Department of Justice, and seeing the myriad ways that taxpayers use to avoid paying what they owe, will do that to a person. While abuse of the tax laws cuts across most income levels and demographics, I found that the wealthiest people often came up with the most “creative” explanations for why they didn’t follow the tax laws.

And President-elect Donald Trump is no exception. His private foundation just admitted what the press has been reporting for months: that in 2015 it engaged in what the tax code calls “prohibited transactions” and what the rest of us call self-dealing. More importantly, Trump’s foundation admitted that it had engaged in self-dealing in years before 2015. This will require the filing of additional tax returns reporting those prohibited transactions, and the payment of excise taxes to the IRS on them. It could also require the insiders to repay the foundation, and require the foundation to undo those transactions, or face a 200% excise tax.

No big deal, right?

Wrong. You see, the foundation filed tax returns for earlier years in which it claimed that it had not engaged in self-dealing. The people who signed those returns for the foundation did so under penalty of perjury. And knowingly signing a materially false tax return is a felony that is punishable by a prison sentence and a hefty fine. The foundation’s admission – also made under penalty of perjury – that those earlier returns were false raises a legitimate question about whether the signers knew they were false at the time.

Read more:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/taxanalysts/2016/11/28/which-is-the-trump-foundations-bigger-crime-self-dealing-or-keeping-it-a-secret/#52523ece4a14