Quote:
Originally Posted by finnbow
He has been a tax fraud for decades which the recent criminal convictions of the Trump Organization demonstrated. More indictments and convictions are forthcoming.
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That conviction demonstrated that an employee of the Trump organization - their CFO - copped a plea and cooperated with an investigation into paying employees non W-2 wages to company execs. Did Trump know this was happening? Maybe, maybe not.
You specifically called Trump a criminal. I'm still waiting to hear what crime he committed, when his trial and conviction were, and when he served his jail term.
By the way, not excusing what Trump's company did, but the non-W-2 wage payments totaled $1.7 MM over 10 years or about $140K per year.
About 2 miles from my house, there's a light industrial business park, with about 60 or 70 businesses there. Most of these are small to medium-sized employers. I'd be willing to bet that these smaller businesses collectively payout
at least $1.7 MM per year in payments that should have been classified as W-2 income, or they paid out W-2 income that was not correctly or fully taxed.
Here are just a few examples of payments that are often not correctly characterized as W-2 wages, or not taxed properly:
- payment of bonus wages.
- giving an employee gift card (i.e., as a performance bonus or incentive) and not recording the payment as wages.
- employee moving expenses
- mileage reimbursements
- business travel expense reimbursements, including entertainment expenses.
- employment of contractors who are paid via 1099 but should have been treated as employees under IRS rules and paid W-2 wages.
- taking health benefit premium deductions from employees who participate in an employer-administered health plan on a pre-tax basis without having legitimate bonafide plan documents, plan testing and tax filing in place.
- Same as above but for 401(k) or 403(b) plan deductions.
- failure to properly withhold local taxes from employees' pay.
- etc.
This happens in America every day. In the case of the business park near me (and other small and medium-sized businesses across the country), this non-compliance would be fueled by small and medium size employers likely not being aware of certain requirements under the US or local tax codes. Sometimes employers are aware of elements of the tax code but choose to incur the risk anyway.
I know that there's a very strong likelihood that there are other employers in New York that are evading tax regs by engaging in similar actions as those listed above. I wonder when Leticia James is going to start investigating them?