Does Donald Trump get a tax break by burying ex-wife Ivana Trump at his Trump Nationwide Golf Membership?

Donald Trump’s first spouse Ivana was buried in a gold-hued coffin on the former president’s New Jersey golf membership final month, following an Upper East Side funeral service the place she was remembered as a girl who was “adored.”

Nonetheless, the Trump household has been accused of getting ulterior motives for selecting the golf course as Ivana’s last resting place — motives that would profit the household patriarch’s funds.

Trump’s first spouse—and mom to his three oldest youngsters Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric—passed away in July after a fall at her Manhattan residence.

She was laid to relaxation at Trump Nationwide Golf Membership in Bedminster, New Jersey, according to the New York Post, which reported that her grave was “not too removed from the principle clubhouse.”

May Ivana’s resting place profit Trump financially?

Documents printed by ProPublica present that the Trump Household Belief beforehand sought to designate a property in Hackettstown—round 20 miles from the golf course the place Ivana is buried—as a non-profit cemetery firm.

Defining the golf course as a cemetery may grant the enterprise an entire raft of tax breaks.

Under New Jersey law, land getting used for cemetery functions is exempt from actual property and private property taxes, in addition to gross sales tax, inheritance tax, enterprise tax and earnings tax.

Cemetery property can be granted authorized protections that different companies aren’t afforded – for instance, if a courtroom judgment orders a cemetery firm to repay excellent money owed, the enterprise can’t legally be compelled to promote “cemetery property” to settle what it owes.

Does one grave qualify the golf membership as a cemetery?

Ivana Trump is the one identified particular person to have been buried onsite at Trump Nationwide Golf Membership, in line with studies.

Brooke Harrington, a tax researcher and professor of sociology at Dartmouth, mentioned in a tweet on Sunday that utilizing the golf course as a cemetery was “a trifecta of tax avoidance.”

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She added that in New Jersey, there was “no stipulation relating to a minimal [number] of human stays obligatory for the tax breaks to kick in.”

“Seems to be like one corpse will suffice to make at the very least three types of tax vanish,” she mentioned.

Is Trump planning a much bigger onsite cemetery?

Representatives for Donald J. Trump and the Trump Group weren’t obtainable for remark when contacted by Fortune.

Nonetheless, Trump himself has beforehand expressed needs to be buried at his New Jersey golf membership, telling the New York Post in 2007 that he needed to be laid to relaxation within the “lovely land” of Bedminster.

“Mr. Trump … particularly selected this property for his last resting place as it’s his favourite property,” his firm wrote in a 2014 submitting seen by the Washington Post.

The submitting sought approval to construct a 10-plot non-public household mausoleum at Trump Nationwide Golf Membership.

Resistance from native decision-makers reportedly led to withdrawals and resubmittal of proposed burial sites through the years, with Trump’s concepts starting from a small however opulent household mausoleum to a 1,000-grave web site that might see plots on the market to members of the golf membership.

Has Trump been accused of tax evasion earlier than?

Whereas registering the golf course as a cemetery would exempt it from taxes, the previous president already discovered a solution to slash his tax invoice for the New Jersey membership by registering it as a farm, the Huffington Post reported in 2019.

Trump reportedly owns a number of goats and farms hay on the resort, which diminished his tax invoice by round $88,000 a yr, in line with a Huffington Put up evaluation.

Underneath this association, the golf course was taxed at simply over $6 an acre in 2019, relatively than $462 an acre.

A yr earlier, the New York Times reported that Trump had used varied methods to evade taxes on the fortune he inherited from his father.

In the meantime, paperwork filed by the New York lawyer basic earlier this year accused the Trump Group of massively misrepresenting the worth of a few of its largest belongings with the intention to safe loans, insurance coverage and tax breaks.