Before Donald Trump announced his campaign, he said he would release his taxes. Last October, he said he’d release them when Hillary released her emails. Well, that’s done. But still no tax returns from Donald Trump.
For months, Donald Trump has held that he won’t release his tax returns until the Internal Revenue Service completes an audit of his finances. On Tuesday, he admitted that he could actually make the returns public at any time. …
The GOP nominee here acknowledged that the audit itself is not preventing him from making the returns public. Instead, he implied that there is no political advantage to doing so.
It’s been clear for months that Trump’s excuse for not releasing the taxes was not valid.
He uses the bogus claim that he can’t because he is being audited, an argument Richard Nixon could have used to block releasing his tax returns in the midst of the Watergate scandal, but didn’t (after a lot of delay). Also, Trump’s returns from 2002 through 2008 can be released without an issue—all audits involving them are over. But he wants to pretend—or should I say lie?—that turning over records more than a decade old will somehow affect a current audit.
Trump is now simply claiming that people don't care about seeing his taxes, though that's absolutely not true.
A new Monmouth University poll shows 62% of voters think it’s either very important or somewhat important to them that candidates release their returns.
What is Trump hiding? It’s been decades since the public last got a look at Donald Trump’s taxes. At the time what they showed was that Trump paid no taxes.
The last time information from Donald Trump’s income-tax returns was made public, the bottom line was striking: He had paid the federal government $0 in income taxes.
But that’s probably not what Trump is afraid to reveal. It could be connections to Russia, or to businesses Trump would just as soon keep hidden. But the truth is, the taxes probably show that Trump isn't nearly as rich as he claims.
In July, Trump’s campaign in the press release that accompanied the financial filing stated that the candidate made $362 million in 2014. In fact, a close reading of the two documents, especially the PFD, shows that number is actually Trump’s revenues, and not his income, which should be after salaries, IT costs, interest and all other expenses. Indeed, the filing specifically labels these items under such headings as “revenue,” “sales,” “royalties,” “commissions” and other categories—clearly designating them as gross receipts rather than taxable income.
Fortune’s estimate puts Trump’s actual income at around one-third of what’s listed as “income” in his filing statement. But the truth is the statement has ranges of values so broad, it’s difficult to determine anything at all—except that what Trump is bringing in seems pretty small for someone claiming a net worth of $10 billion.
Considering that Donald Trump has been shunned by American banks and gone to increasingly risky sources of revenue, what Donald Trump’s taxes might reveal is that the hot air behind his campaign is the most valuable asset he has left.