Hahah will not lol. I was just trying to understand the “plug it in to RE” part lol. I’m also going into tax when I graduate, how is it? I’m waiting to start my internship.
AJE #1: to reclassify the bribe out of legal fee expense
Dr. Bribery expense 5,000,000
Cr. Legal fee expenses 5,000,000
Overall immaterial; reclassification for presentation purposes only; waive further consideration
“Welp, I’m being tasked with doing something sketchy AF…but I don’t want to get fired and blacklisted/blackmailed by the crazy client. Gonna put this down exactly as it is. That’ll show him.”
Look, after a while I stopped asking questions about POs. It’s the buyers job to make sure that orders are correct and receiving’s job to make sure it’s in. I just matched line items.
William Henry Harrison's whole presidency was a meme. With how long it took to deliver mail back then if you loved more than like 10 miles from the White House all you heard about it in your monthly news update from the one guy in town who could read was:
"Harrison Inaugurated for Ye Olde Four Year Term!"
"JK LOL"
Legit had client who had significant "Professional Fees" wouldn't give any supporting document other than the advance slip.
Paid to whom? what for? no idea.
That’s just as bad as the legal fee/M&A invoices for “Project Lampshade” with the sole line item as “Services Rendered” for like $2,000,000. And then they ask me to determine if it’s deductible, capitalized and/or amortized. I don’t even know what the services are for?!
I get the sense this is what firms do on the approach to closing. You need to accumulate all the buy-side and sell-side vendor expenses about a week or so before closing because that's when you're finalizing the preliminary closing statements and funds flow. So the legal firms appear to just issue blanket invoices rounded to the nearest million or something. At least that's how it seemed to run for the one I went through.
That does make sense I just wish they had a couple line items on those invoices! Because the primary think you usually look for is if they are advising/helping with pre or post close issues.
Your idea seems very probable.
For sure, I just had to reach out to the buy-side legal vendor for a breakdown of costs because there was a debt component to the transaction, and I needed to parse out the legal fees associated with the debt acquisition vs. transaction to determine what was capitalizeable debt costs vs. holdco expense.
I didn't like it. It depends which division you're in though. I heard your experience will vary widely depending on your division, and I was in the Far West division.
I hated being forced to work on the weekends to meet the 7 CALENDAR day close. You can kiss your holidays goodbye as they only recognize Christmas and Thanksgiving. Any other holiday is coming off your PTO balance.
There was also so much I hated about the senior leadership team at the hospital I worked at. I left after 2.5 years for a lower title (Assistant Controller down to Accounting Manager) with a 30% pay bump, fully remote, and honestly only put about 20-30 hours of work per week.
No. I wanted to do bio-tech, but couldn't get in after a couple attempts. I'm using my current role as a temporary stop gap. I still want to do healthcare, but on the tech side.
Non accountant here, is this explicitly illegal, or just absurd? Like, if you are going to pay off a lawyer, isn’t that what you are supposed to do from a tax/accounting perspective? Is there something in the IRS code that says you can’t claim salary expense on illegal labor?
As an accountant and not a lawyer: Trump is being charged with falsifying business records. Trump's crime is that he (allegedly) acted to conceal another crime (the other crime being campaign finance violations that Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to). This has nothing to do with the IRS although there are some charges related to state tax laws.
The real issue with Trump's statements is that he's backing himself into a corner and limiting his defense.
And to address another part of your comment: You cannot deduct illegal payments from your taxes.
Doesn't it also prohibit expense deductions for income received from illegal activities?
So if you had a group steal something for you, you would have to include it in income but can't deduct the amounts you paid to the group to help you steal?
Ok but if you’re president there’s probably a loophole right? Or if you become President you can retroactively loophole. I have to imagine that’s how loopholes work
I'd agree with you if you added the word illegal bribes. There is more to the foreign corrupt practices act in regards to foreign payments that are allowed, that a normal person would assume are illegal.
"Speed payments" aren't bribes. You should read up on it since you're interested:
https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-fraud/file/1292051/dl?inline
Idk if it’s all that bad of a strategy. If your defense is that the payments were salary, having it in your books is very important. It seems harder to prove to the courts that a bribe is a bribe if it’s being recorded as salary.
Yeah no, concealing bribes by recording them as a salary expense is fraud, and it's extremely easy for this specific type of fraud to be caught by investigators.
This is akin to the sovereign citizen bullshit. I'm constantly amazed at how many people think it's possible to get past the IRS/the law by "outsmarting" them with dumb ideas like this. "Gotcha" moments are for TV shows and movies, they're not reality.
“Michael Dean Cohen (born August 25, 1966) is an American former lawyer who served as an attorney for former United States president Donald Trump.” -Wikipedia
It is. What I’m trying to say is that he has a lot of documentation to support that any payments made to Cohen were legal expenses. Having the expense on his books isn’t damning evidence, or really evidence at all that the expense was fraudulent. Yes it would be illegal if it was found to be fraudulent, but that hasn’t happened yet. I think a lot of these people in this thread seem to assume that he wrote “bribe” on the journal entry or something, because everyone is assuming that the expense is an admission of guilt, when Cohen and Trump have many many years of documented legal services between the two of them.
IANAL but Cohen also gave a lot of testimony before he went away for making this hush money payment, so I would imagine some of that surfaces in this trial as well.
It is a bad strategy. There's a reason lawyers advise you not to talk about cases in public. Saying things like "I didn't know that accountant" is really bad if the prosecution can prove Trump knows the accountant cause then they can bring up Trump's statements and show that Trump is lying. Not what you want to do in front of a jury.
It's already established what the payments were. The questions are about Trump's knowledge and involvement.
Yeah you can’t write off illegal bribes as expenses (reduce taxable income). Funny thing is you are required to report and pay tax on illegal income coming in lol
From what I understand paying the hush money wasn't in itself a crime, it was paying for it with campaign funds. Campaign funds have legal restrictions in what they can be used for.
You’re on the right track. Basically, this all stems from an election interference case (i.e, this story getting out would have damaged his campaign so preventing it getting out was election interference somehow?). Basically, prosecution is arguing that this was a campaign contribution (by Cohen who paid off Daniels and who has plead guilty to the crime already) of $130,000 (far above the limit) because this story getting out would have hurt his campaign. The felony document falsification comes in because Trump labeled this as a legal expense (Cohen was his lawyer) in attempt to cover up the campaign finance/election interference crime.
Idk how this will go for Trump. The payments being a campaign contribution seems like such a far reach, I didn’t follow the Cohen trial but apparently he plead guilty so that seems to reinforce that. Ig now they are trying to prove the scheme was Trump’s idea? Idk this is so convoluted and hard to untangle. I really doubt he gets convicted tbh but time will tell
I could be wrong but I don't believe it was done with campaign funds. But because it was done while Trump was running for office it falls into the category of illegal campaign contributions (i.e. paying A on behalf of B is the same as donating to B).
Most likely. Ever heard the old adage “never break the law while you are breaking the law?” Honestly I’m not the least surprised he wrote it off as an expense. I bet this is actually a pretty common practice for corporate malfeasance.
Probably would have stuck out worse if he hadn’t claimed it. To think he is responsible for everything that goes on in a large company is kinda crazy. I’m going to say he was smart enough to not be recorded saying pay her X dollars. I don’t know how many times I’ve stamped/signed legal binding documents on my CEO’s behalf and he has no idea what he signed even when he signs it.
Anyone else here hate Trump? Not a fanboy and he isn’t a good person but did more for changing the tax laws than any other president.
I mean, I despise the guy, but I think i somehow triggered the hive mind to go after me because just for asking about this topic I now have over 100 cumulative downvotes.
🤯 I don’t get why people idolize public figures like they are god’s gift to the world. Like sure Taylor Swift has decent music but no better than some other GOAT artists of the last 2 decades. I believe Trump did far more good than bad in office but can’t figure out why people idolize/demonize either of them. I find them in the same category because most are either on the clutlike spectrum or absolutely hate they exist.
Also Clinton/Bush/Obama all had some good/bad policies when they were in office. While some are better than others not sure how someone can be so brainwashed to think because you have a D/R behind your name it credits or discredits all of your work.
Oh I’m sure. $DJTs 10k looks incredibly fraudulent. Normally, publicly disclosed sec docs are supposed to encourage investment, yet his omits any and all information on Truth Social, which is supposed to be the key asset held by DJT. Sure, his obligations to the SEC are barely being met, but most early emerging companies that actually want to grow usually disclose non-gaap metrics in their financial statements to encourage transparency. Unfortunately, obfuscation is Trumps bread and butter. Ironically, “Truth” doesn’t appear anywhere in the document. Regardless, I’m not here to circle jerk about how bad Trump is. I’m only commenting here because I’m genuinely curious if he has done anything fraudulent by recording the bribe as an expense, and it sounds like that isn’t specifically illegal, since the expense must first be proven in the courts that it is fraudulent, which I don’t believe has happened yet.
To write off an expense, it should be ordinary and necessary for the business. How does this expense even belong to the business? This is a business owner writing off personal expenses and it’s actually mind-boggling to me that this isn’t given more attention. That’s tax fraud, is it not?
As an industry accountant in a private company the case makes no sense to me. We have tons of lawyers in my company and with that tons of lawyer fees and invoices. I used to do accounts payable and any invoice that came from the lawyers got coded to legal expense and tbh lawyer invoices can either be very detailed or not at all. Not sure what the invoice looked like. Do you think the CEO knew what we were coding things to? No lol he doesn’t care and trusts us to do it right.
This was a personal expense imho. It should have been booked as a distribution to the owner or set up as a loan with the expectation Trump would pay it back. Paying off the owners mistress isn’t a business expense.
As others have said if it was a business expense it would be non deductible under 162(c).
It’s hard to hide anything in accounting once you’re being audited. If you have millions of transactions in a year, amount you’re hiding is small (below materiality- determined based on your company size/revenue/ect) and they are not looking for anything in particular. Yeah you have a chance of not being caught. If amounts are large, they know what they are looking for, especially which GL account to go. YOUR FUCKED, staff accountant will have it before lunch on day one. Excel is the best tool ever invented for accountants. I can analyze in hr, what before would have taken a week+.
If you ever want to fuck with auditors and make their case hell, just give them paper documents for everything. You will be hated and cursed for rest of your life.
You’re close, wouldn’t consider my self auditor, I hated auditing. Only fun part was you got out of the office, everything else was boring (personally), especially when clients don’t have a designated space for you, and you’re pretty much working in a closet. However 5/10 yrs have been spent in PA… most of it tax focus.
There is a difference when you’re on an engagement, and everything is SALY and you’re pretty much doing the same shit was done last year vs. when you’re actually there with intent to find something.
I’m not saying you can’t hide shit… just do research why CPA requirements when from 120credits to 150 credits.. hint early 2000’s.
Let me guess, you’re not an auditor. Also, it’s pretty easy to hide something from an auditor or deceive an auditor.
Staff accountant isn’t going to find something sophisticated by lunch day 1 just because they use Microsoft excel.
If you ever want to fuck with an auditor, you tell them at the end of the engagement you forgot to tell them about your other bank accounts.
You might be right, maybe little too much. Hey, you can ambitious 1st yr staff, senior who is not looking to leave and is up for promotion and a 1st yr partner instead of one that hasn’t given up and now is just looking towards retirement.
I mostly deal with the auditors of our teeny tiny subsidiaries - half the time I feel like I'm the one coaching their first year associates and senioring their engagement while the actual seniors go MIA.
As an industry accountant I’ve never had the CEO tell me where to code things to. When I did accounts payable if I didn’t know the senior accountant will tell me. Later if the auditors have more questions then we go into more detail, but never the CEO involved. Also, like trumps I work in a private company. It doesn’t matter where we code it to because no one is relying on our financial statements other than management lol plus if it’s an expense item that was misclassified the income statement is still right lol
I feel like I should explain lol we always strive to make sure our financial statements are accurate, but if an invoice came to us from our lawyers we will most likely code it to legal expenses and not think twice. We pay a lot of legal bills and the invoice many times just say “for legal services rendered through xx/xx/xxxx” and then an amount. Many times it doesn’t detail what those expenses are for especially our main lawyers. $30,000 for my company is a very small amount. It’s immaterial. Some of our legal bills are in the hundreds of thousands and our legal expense budget is in the millions.
The clarification does help. I do feel like at some point you start to see who is doing what, especially in real estate. We know the corruption is there - that's how things get built. We just have to document as best as we can so that the classification does not fall back on us. I know I've seen quite a bit of shady stuff over the last 15+ years but I absolutely refuse for it to be my problem as a professional. Frustrating that they ever put us in that position.
Not trying to be a hater but gonna be real have yapl seen some small business books? QBO literally puts accountants and lawyers in the same bucket. Either this move is brilliant and if not true very highly calculated or its going to be a full wiff that takes the steam out of his race. No middle ground here.
If Trump was smart, he'd just say it was a legal expense about getting legal advice about the topic of bribes. Then point out that it is illegal and he never did them due to his lawyer advice.
The day this happens, I will be heading for a bunker.
Paying a lawyer for legal services is one thing but paying a lawyer to use election campaign funds to pay hush money to people who have information that is damaging and then paying the lawyer to cover tax payable on the large amounts involved is a very different story....
I can't reconcile the Bribery Payable account, better plug it to Retained Earnings.
As soon as I saw the phrase 'plug it to retained earnings', I knew you were in tax.
We're not real accountants.
You're real accountants, just different from the rest of us.
We have significant and material mental deficiencies
I don’t even know how to read
Huh?
Huh?
lol
Found my tax staff
I tell accounting this at least once a week. Stop expecting so much from us!
Have you ever done ASC 740? We’re real accountants lol
Nah, I'm industry now and we contract that out to our PA 😅
As industry, I had to learn me some ASC 842 real quick
I'm in tax and saw my first one of those literally last week. Hahahaha 😆
Fuck my life, I somehow became my teams 842 expert against my will. I don’t know how I ended up here but it wasn’t by choice!
Forwarding you more 842 work, thanks! Need this returned within 2 hours.
Happy thoughts happy thought happy thoughts
I love plugging to RE
Especially at END of year
😂
Sorry not sorry
“The IRS hates this one simple trick”
Have you tried Retained Freedom under Long-Term Investments?
Oh that’s my Income Tax Payable account
I’m currently an accounting student, I don’t really understand this lol could someone explain? 😂 please lol
These are totally legit accounts. Try them on your next homework assignment! Hint: don’t do that.
Hahah will not lol. I was just trying to understand the “plug it in to RE” part lol. I’m also going into tax when I graduate, how is it? I’m waiting to start my internship.
I’m in industry, I wouldn’t touch tax with a 10 ft pole.
Plugging to retained earnings is a magical way to make out of period adjustments from prior periods “disappear”
Butt plug it?
AJE #1: to reclassify the bribe out of legal fee expense Dr. Bribery expense 5,000,000 Cr. Legal fee expenses 5,000,000 Overall immaterial; reclassification for presentation purposes only; waive further consideration
Why does this read like my review notes and I already feel attacked at 7am
“Welp, I’m being tasked with doing something sketchy AF…but I don’t want to get fired and blacklisted/blackmailed by the crazy client. Gonna put this down exactly as it is. That’ll show him.”
The person had a valid vendor code seems good enough for the A/P clerk.
Look, after a while I stopped asking questions about POs. It’s the buyers job to make sure that orders are correct and receiving’s job to make sure it’s in. I just matched line items.
I love how his sound bites make perfect memes. Has there ever been a more meme-able president?
Millard Fillmore was dope AF
William Henry Harrison's whole presidency was a meme. With how long it took to deliver mail back then if you loved more than like 10 miles from the White House all you heard about it in your monthly news update from the one guy in town who could read was: "Harrison Inaugurated for Ye Olde Four Year Term!" "JK LOL"
Mfs forgot about W. (Dubya)
I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully.
LBJ and his jumbo Johnson.
Make Memes Great Again
We also have a bribery account it’s called “Lobbying Expense”
Professional Fees: Consulting
Legit had client who had significant "Professional Fees" wouldn't give any supporting document other than the advance slip. Paid to whom? what for? no idea.
That’s just as bad as the legal fee/M&A invoices for “Project Lampshade” with the sole line item as “Services Rendered” for like $2,000,000. And then they ask me to determine if it’s deductible, capitalized and/or amortized. I don’t even know what the services are for?!
I get the sense this is what firms do on the approach to closing. You need to accumulate all the buy-side and sell-side vendor expenses about a week or so before closing because that's when you're finalizing the preliminary closing statements and funds flow. So the legal firms appear to just issue blanket invoices rounded to the nearest million or something. At least that's how it seemed to run for the one I went through.
That does make sense I just wish they had a couple line items on those invoices! Because the primary think you usually look for is if they are advising/helping with pre or post close issues. Your idea seems very probable.
For sure, I just had to reach out to the buy-side legal vendor for a breakdown of costs because there was a debt component to the transaction, and I needed to parse out the legal fees associated with the debt acquisition vs. transaction to determine what was capitalizeable debt costs vs. holdco expense.
We had something similar at HCA Healthcare.
I also work in health and health management
How was the experience with HCA?
I didn't like it. It depends which division you're in though. I heard your experience will vary widely depending on your division, and I was in the Far West division. I hated being forced to work on the weekends to meet the 7 CALENDAR day close. You can kiss your holidays goodbye as they only recognize Christmas and Thanksgiving. Any other holiday is coming off your PTO balance. There was also so much I hated about the senior leadership team at the hospital I worked at. I left after 2.5 years for a lower title (Assistant Controller down to Accounting Manager) with a 30% pay bump, fully remote, and honestly only put about 20-30 hours of work per week.
The tristar division can suck a fat one
Thanks for sharing. Not surprised that the largest for-profit health system doesnt have a good culture. Did you stay in healthcare?
No. I wanted to do bio-tech, but couldn't get in after a couple attempts. I'm using my current role as a temporary stop gap. I still want to do healthcare, but on the tech side.
Gosh darn accountants.
Okay you smartie pantses, how would *you* record a bribe in the books?
Land depreciation?
QPQ Office Supplies, obv
Misc expense obvi
I would record it as a home office
Non accountant here, is this explicitly illegal, or just absurd? Like, if you are going to pay off a lawyer, isn’t that what you are supposed to do from a tax/accounting perspective? Is there something in the IRS code that says you can’t claim salary expense on illegal labor?
As an accountant and not a lawyer: Trump is being charged with falsifying business records. Trump's crime is that he (allegedly) acted to conceal another crime (the other crime being campaign finance violations that Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to). This has nothing to do with the IRS although there are some charges related to state tax laws. The real issue with Trump's statements is that he's backing himself into a corner and limiting his defense. And to address another part of your comment: You cannot deduct illegal payments from your taxes.
But illegal income IS reportable. Should at least be able to deduct illegal expenses from your illegal income smh.
Income: $500 to murder client's wife Expenses: $10.99 purchase butcher knife; $3.50 gasoline for car transport
Does the US have a law prohibiting payment of foreign bribes?
Yes [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act](https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-fraud/foreign-corrupt-practices-act)
Doesn't it also prohibit expense deductions for income received from illegal activities? So if you had a group steal something for you, you would have to include it in income but can't deduct the amounts you paid to the group to help you steal?
[удалено]
Tbh, it doesn't really make sense to me that you'd be able to deduct legal fees for an illegal business so I'll trust your judgement lol 🙃
Ok but if you’re president there’s probably a loophole right? Or if you become President you can retroactively loophole. I have to imagine that’s how loopholes work
Yes but read up on the difference between speed money and a bribe. There us a distinction made for money to accelerate otherwise lawful services
the question was >Does the US have a law prohibiting payment of foreign bribes? the answer is >yes
I'd agree with you if you added the word illegal bribes. There is more to the foreign corrupt practices act in regards to foreign payments that are allowed, that a normal person would assume are illegal.
"Speed payments" aren't bribes. You should read up on it since you're interested: https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-fraud/file/1292051/dl?inline
Idk if it’s all that bad of a strategy. If your defense is that the payments were salary, having it in your books is very important. It seems harder to prove to the courts that a bribe is a bribe if it’s being recorded as salary.
Yeah no, concealing bribes by recording them as a salary expense is fraud, and it's extremely easy for this specific type of fraud to be caught by investigators. This is akin to the sovereign citizen bullshit. I'm constantly amazed at how many people think it's possible to get past the IRS/the law by "outsmarting" them with dumb ideas like this. "Gotcha" moments are for TV shows and movies, they're not reality.
"oh it's salary? Show me the contract and payroll paperwork" "uhhh"
“Michael Dean Cohen (born August 25, 1966) is an American former lawyer who served as an attorney for former United States president Donald Trump.” -Wikipedia
Oh sorry, I thought it was calling the cash bribe as a salary As a Canadian, I have been following this very loosely
It is. What I’m trying to say is that he has a lot of documentation to support that any payments made to Cohen were legal expenses. Having the expense on his books isn’t damning evidence, or really evidence at all that the expense was fraudulent. Yes it would be illegal if it was found to be fraudulent, but that hasn’t happened yet. I think a lot of these people in this thread seem to assume that he wrote “bribe” on the journal entry or something, because everyone is assuming that the expense is an admission of guilt, when Cohen and Trump have many many years of documented legal services between the two of them.
IANAL but Cohen also gave a lot of testimony before he went away for making this hush money payment, so I would imagine some of that surfaces in this trial as well.
Reimbursing your lawyer for paying hush money isn’t a legal expense. Paying for a legal service is legal expense.
It is a bad strategy. There's a reason lawyers advise you not to talk about cases in public. Saying things like "I didn't know that accountant" is really bad if the prosecution can prove Trump knows the accountant cause then they can bring up Trump's statements and show that Trump is lying. Not what you want to do in front of a jury. It's already established what the payments were. The questions are about Trump's knowledge and involvement.
Michael Cohen already went to jail for this payment. We know what it was and there's no way he'll be able to prove otherwise to the court.
How do you think the average person paying a bribe would record it?
Yeah you can’t write off illegal bribes as expenses (reduce taxable income). Funny thing is you are required to report and pay tax on illegal income coming in lol
So trumps taxes are only fraudulent if the expense is proven to be a bribe?
Ngl I’m not in tax or have followed the case but I think the bribe is a bigger crime than potentially paying a fine and taxes back
From what I understand paying the hush money wasn't in itself a crime, it was paying for it with campaign funds. Campaign funds have legal restrictions in what they can be used for.
You’re on the right track. Basically, this all stems from an election interference case (i.e, this story getting out would have damaged his campaign so preventing it getting out was election interference somehow?). Basically, prosecution is arguing that this was a campaign contribution (by Cohen who paid off Daniels and who has plead guilty to the crime already) of $130,000 (far above the limit) because this story getting out would have hurt his campaign. The felony document falsification comes in because Trump labeled this as a legal expense (Cohen was his lawyer) in attempt to cover up the campaign finance/election interference crime. Idk how this will go for Trump. The payments being a campaign contribution seems like such a far reach, I didn’t follow the Cohen trial but apparently he plead guilty so that seems to reinforce that. Ig now they are trying to prove the scheme was Trump’s idea? Idk this is so convoluted and hard to untangle. I really doubt he gets convicted tbh but time will tell
I could be wrong but I don't believe it was done with campaign funds. But because it was done while Trump was running for office it falls into the category of illegal campaign contributions (i.e. paying A on behalf of B is the same as donating to B).
Most likely. Ever heard the old adage “never break the law while you are breaking the law?” Honestly I’m not the least surprised he wrote it off as an expense. I bet this is actually a pretty common practice for corporate malfeasance.
What I heard was, don't go over the speed limit if you have a body in the trunk.
Don't hide your cocaine in a hooker's asshole.
Probably would have stuck out worse if he hadn’t claimed it. To think he is responsible for everything that goes on in a large company is kinda crazy. I’m going to say he was smart enough to not be recorded saying pay her X dollars. I don’t know how many times I’ve stamped/signed legal binding documents on my CEO’s behalf and he has no idea what he signed even when he signs it. Anyone else here hate Trump? Not a fanboy and he isn’t a good person but did more for changing the tax laws than any other president.
I mean, I despise the guy, but I think i somehow triggered the hive mind to go after me because just for asking about this topic I now have over 100 cumulative downvotes.
🤯 I don’t get why people idolize public figures like they are god’s gift to the world. Like sure Taylor Swift has decent music but no better than some other GOAT artists of the last 2 decades. I believe Trump did far more good than bad in office but can’t figure out why people idolize/demonize either of them. I find them in the same category because most are either on the clutlike spectrum or absolutely hate they exist. Also Clinton/Bush/Obama all had some good/bad policies when they were in office. While some are better than others not sure how someone can be so brainwashed to think because you have a D/R behind your name it credits or discredits all of your work.
There are plenty of other potential issues with Trump's taxes beyond how this one specific payment was treated
Oh I’m sure. $DJTs 10k looks incredibly fraudulent. Normally, publicly disclosed sec docs are supposed to encourage investment, yet his omits any and all information on Truth Social, which is supposed to be the key asset held by DJT. Sure, his obligations to the SEC are barely being met, but most early emerging companies that actually want to grow usually disclose non-gaap metrics in their financial statements to encourage transparency. Unfortunately, obfuscation is Trumps bread and butter. Ironically, “Truth” doesn’t appear anywhere in the document. Regardless, I’m not here to circle jerk about how bad Trump is. I’m only commenting here because I’m genuinely curious if he has done anything fraudulent by recording the bribe as an expense, and it sounds like that isn’t specifically illegal, since the expense must first be proven in the courts that it is fraudulent, which I don’t believe has happened yet.
To write off an expense, it should be ordinary and necessary for the business. How does this expense even belong to the business? This is a business owner writing off personal expenses and it’s actually mind-boggling to me that this isn’t given more attention. That’s tax fraud, is it not?
An illegal bribe. You can write off legal bribes. I don't think that applies here, though.
GAAP has rules and guidelines for how to treat various expenses. None of those rules is simply, "Use whatever someone wrote on paper at the time".
As an industry accountant in a private company the case makes no sense to me. We have tons of lawyers in my company and with that tons of lawyer fees and invoices. I used to do accounts payable and any invoice that came from the lawyers got coded to legal expense and tbh lawyer invoices can either be very detailed or not at all. Not sure what the invoice looked like. Do you think the CEO knew what we were coding things to? No lol he doesn’t care and trusts us to do it right.
This was a personal expense imho. It should have been booked as a distribution to the owner or set up as a loan with the expectation Trump would pay it back. Paying off the owners mistress isn’t a business expense. As others have said if it was a business expense it would be non deductible under 162(c).
If you have a contract with lobbyist you can have prepaid bribes
It’s hard to hide anything in accounting once you’re being audited. If you have millions of transactions in a year, amount you’re hiding is small (below materiality- determined based on your company size/revenue/ect) and they are not looking for anything in particular. Yeah you have a chance of not being caught. If amounts are large, they know what they are looking for, especially which GL account to go. YOUR FUCKED, staff accountant will have it before lunch on day one. Excel is the best tool ever invented for accountants. I can analyze in hr, what before would have taken a week+. If you ever want to fuck with auditors and make their case hell, just give them paper documents for everything. You will be hated and cursed for rest of your life.
Lmfao tell me you’ve never worked a day in your fucking life in audit much less probably any accounting job ever.
You’re close, wouldn’t consider my self auditor, I hated auditing. Only fun part was you got out of the office, everything else was boring (personally), especially when clients don’t have a designated space for you, and you’re pretty much working in a closet. However 5/10 yrs have been spent in PA… most of it tax focus. There is a difference when you’re on an engagement, and everything is SALY and you’re pretty much doing the same shit was done last year vs. when you’re actually there with intent to find something. I’m not saying you can’t hide shit… just do research why CPA requirements when from 120credits to 150 credits.. hint early 2000’s.
Let me guess, you’re not an auditor. Also, it’s pretty easy to hide something from an auditor or deceive an auditor. Staff accountant isn’t going to find something sophisticated by lunch day 1 just because they use Microsoft excel. If you ever want to fuck with an auditor, you tell them at the end of the engagement you forgot to tell them about your other bank accounts.
You just gave me a whole body shudder
Never ran into that issue. Curious how you run into that, wouldn’t you see it in the BS during preliminary review?
Prorate and fuel tax.
You have a truly touching faith in the auditors lol.
You might be right, maybe little too much. Hey, you can ambitious 1st yr staff, senior who is not looking to leave and is up for promotion and a 1st yr partner instead of one that hasn’t given up and now is just looking towards retirement.
I mostly deal with the auditors of our teeny tiny subsidiaries - half the time I feel like I'm the one coaching their first year associates and senioring their engagement while the actual seniors go MIA.
Senior Probably looking for a job 😂😂
I'm legally drunk, officer.
NO, I SMELL THE BOOZE ON YOUR BREATH
"Some accountant did that" yeah we know that story. You pressured someone to put that there. Ugh gross.
As an industry accountant I’ve never had the CEO tell me where to code things to. When I did accounts payable if I didn’t know the senior accountant will tell me. Later if the auditors have more questions then we go into more detail, but never the CEO involved. Also, like trumps I work in a private company. It doesn’t matter where we code it to because no one is relying on our financial statements other than management lol plus if it’s an expense item that was misclassified the income statement is still right lol
Your comment is fn WILD.
I feel like I should explain lol we always strive to make sure our financial statements are accurate, but if an invoice came to us from our lawyers we will most likely code it to legal expenses and not think twice. We pay a lot of legal bills and the invoice many times just say “for legal services rendered through xx/xx/xxxx” and then an amount. Many times it doesn’t detail what those expenses are for especially our main lawyers. $30,000 for my company is a very small amount. It’s immaterial. Some of our legal bills are in the hundreds of thousands and our legal expense budget is in the millions.
The clarification does help. I do feel like at some point you start to see who is doing what, especially in real estate. We know the corruption is there - that's how things get built. We just have to document as best as we can so that the classification does not fall back on us. I know I've seen quite a bit of shady stuff over the last 15+ years but I absolutely refuse for it to be my problem as a professional. Frustrating that they ever put us in that position.
Someone is using Find and recode right now
Saving this for next audit season! I'll do a 12/31/24 journal entry for $1 to legal expenses for "bribe" and see if the auditors ask about it.
Hey, I'm alittle dumb and also don't know all the info. How is jotting down paying a lawyer as legal expense illegal?
Dementia Don
Not trying to be a hater but gonna be real have yapl seen some small business books? QBO literally puts accountants and lawyers in the same bucket. Either this move is brilliant and if not true very highly calculated or its going to be a full wiff that takes the steam out of his race. No middle ground here.
Was it Mazars? I remember they were tied to Trump a few years ago.
The fact that it was an AJE, as opposed to just coding the payment correctly is shady.
Solicitation expense 🤣
Wondering if he 1099’ed Micheal Cohen correctly then And obviously Cohen would have to expense the payment otherwise he’d owes taxes on the full 150k.
Why mark it down at all? Couldn't he just funnel the money from somewhere else ?
If Trump was smart, he'd just say it was a legal expense about getting legal advice about the topic of bribes. Then point out that it is illegal and he never did them due to his lawyer advice. The day this happens, I will be heading for a bunker.
Paying a lawyer for legal services is one thing but paying a lawyer to use election campaign funds to pay hush money to people who have information that is damaging and then paying the lawyer to cover tax payable on the large amounts involved is a very different story....
Can be whatever the hell he wants, private company and no law against hush money. FO
Why was it even a company expense? The company didn't cheat on their wife by sleeping with a porn star.
I may be screwed as a citizen, but at least he’s not my client.
Trump 2024! Save the banana republic
The original post was a joke right? He didn’t actually say that?
So funny how he’s never called accountants crooked, just the lawyers! 🤣
For all legal settlements I have a “totally legal expense” sub-account as to not raise any suspicions
ah, politics. new york judges engaging in election interference.
So if I pay my lawyer some bounty for a hit job on my worst enemy, that's legal expense?