NEW YORK (AP) – Companies constantly give their employees discounts. Many top executives at Fortune 500 companies have access to a company jet for personal use, a company apartment, or an expense report for lost meals. Even lower-level employees regularly get access to perks like tuition reimbursements or cash to join a gym.
But prosecutors’ extravagant perks say the Trump organization that wasted its CFO Allen Weisselberg – apartments, cars, cash for vacation tips, classes for his grandchildren, to name a few – goes way above and beyond to make a cherished one To compensate employees, some tax law experts said.
And the case against Weißelberg appears to be a lot stronger than was originally expected by those watching the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation into the Trump Organization, its staff and its eponymous leader.
“This is an overwhelmingly powerful case,” said Daniel Hemel, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
According to the indictment, which was unsealed on Thursday, Weißelberg defrauded the tax office by taking away a substantial part of his annual compensation in fringe benefits. They say those perks were worth nearly $ 1.8 million over 15 years.
Weisselberg alone has been accused of defrauding the state, state and city of more than $ 900,000 in unpaid taxes and unearned refunds. He pleads not guilty.
“Mr. Weisselberg intends not to plead guilty and will address these allegations in court,” Weisselberg’s attorneys Mary Mulligan and Bryan Skarlatos said in a statement.
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump and his allies have tried to frame the indictment against Weißelberg and the Trump Organization as a “witch hunt” by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both Democrats. They said the associated perks are standard for successful American businesses.
But the case against Weißelberg is not necessarily unusual. Some compared the charges to a tax fraud case involving another real estate tycoon 30 years ago: Leona Helmsley, the Queen of Mean, who tried to get her real estate empire to raise a $ 3 million in the 1980s -Pay for home renovation.
“The dollar numbers and charges are more serious than we’d thought in the past few days from the little information we had,” said Daniel R. Alonso, a former assistant district attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney. “In particular, the alleged tax loss is $ 900,000. This is a fraud amount that is definitely in the prison area for typical cases of this magnitude. “
Melissa Jampol, a former Manhattan assistant attorney specializing in white-collar crime prosecution, said the prosecution’s allegations went well beyond allegations of fringe benefit abuse, which some had suspected would be at the heart of the case.
“I think the most important finding is that there is a lot more allegation here in the indictment than people previously realized,” said Jampol, an attorney at the Epstein Becker Green law firm.
The indictment alleges that it is not only because Weißelberg did not properly report his wages. It states that the Trump Organization as a company was complicit.
The company kept internal records of employee compensation, and those records listed Weisselberg’s rent, tuition fees for his grandchildren, his cars, and other items as part of his compensation package. The company even reduced Weisselberg’s paychecks to account for the indirect compensation he received in the free rent, the indictment said.
However, this compensation was recorded differently in the company’s general ledger and was not reported to the tax authorities, according to prosecutors.
“There’s the set that was the formal ledger, and there’s the set that Weisselberg’s compensation calculations were,” Jampol said.
Smaller cases with similar practices are not uncommon. Just last month, a Queens plumber company was sentenced to 20 months in prison. Sergei Denko was found to have cashed checks for $ 5 million to fund a payroll system that avoided paying around $ 732,000 in employment taxes. A Long Island restaurant owner was convicted in September for also avoiding $ 130,000 in wage taxes.
Thomas M. Cryan, Jr., a Washington tax attorney, said law enforcement for employee fringe benefits are rare, but an unusually large volume of perks and the intent to disguise them as income could turn a civil case into criminal proceedings.
Often times, fringe benefit violations remain between the company and the Internal Revenue Service and can only result in an audit or back tax payment with a fine.
But some of the allegations against Weißelberg go far beyond the abuse of fringe benefits. Weisselberg’s son Barry – who ran a Trump-operated ice rink in Central Park – paid no reported rent while living in a Trump-owned apartment in 2018, and was only charged $ 1,000 a month – well below typical Manhattan prices – while he lived in a Trump apartment from 2005 to 2012, the indictment states.
Allen Weisselberg himself, a very private man who lived in a modest house on Long Island for years, continued to live there, despite spending most of his time in a company-paid apartment in Manhattan, prosecutors said. In doing so, Weisselberg concealed the fact that he lived in New York City and avoided paying the city’s income tax.
Although some stand-alone tax offenses can be handled civilly or administratively, the allegations help explain other misconduct – including aggravated theft – why prosecutors would prosecute this system as criminal, Jampol said.
However, this does not mean that the allegations that require evidence of intent can easily be brought to justice.
“That will really be the burden that prosecutors have to prove that there was a plan and that it wasn’t just a series of mistakes or misunderstandings,” she added.
AP Justice Writer Eric Tucker reported from Washington.
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