- The Trump Org’s first defense witness is Donald Bender. Donald Bender is an outside accountant who is being tried for tax fraud.
- Tuesday, he testified that he would have a heart attack if he had seen the company pay X-mas bonuses.
- Trump signed piecemeal checks that gave bonuses to executives, which the DA calls a tax-dodge.
Long-standing outside accountant for the The Trump Organization was a witness at the tax-fraud hearingOn Tuesday, he testified that he was more shocked than he was to have seen the annual “secret” Christmas bonus lists.
Donald Bender, who was responsible for the company’s taxes for 35 years, said Tuesday to a Manhattan jury that he would have a heart attack.
Jurors have heard that former President Donald Trump signed stacks upon stacks of bonus checks over many years. These were then put into holiday cards for executives of favored companies.
Prosecutors claim that the executive bonuses were part of a 15 year payroll tax avoidance scheme that reached the top of the company.
As taxable income, the bonuses should have been reported in full on each company’s W-2s. Prosecutors say they weren’t.
Prosecutors alleged instead that the executive received the bulk their annual bonuses in separate checks, from a variety Trump Organization subsidiaries. It was as if they had worked in the previous year either as contractors or freelancers for Wollman Rink, Mar-a-Lago and the Trump International Golf Club, Palm Beach, Florida.
According to prosecutors, this allowed the company to reduce its withholding and allow them write off the check as subsidiary expenses. In the meantime, executives could claim the check as freelance income. This allowed them to stash some money in tax free savings accounts, available only to the self employed.
According to documents, Trump Organization paid $1.1 million in executive bonuses in 2015 and gave Allen Weisselberg, its chief finance officer, a $300,000.
That $100,000 was properly paid, as Weisselberg claimed in his W-2 wage statement.
However, $75,000 of his bonus was paid to him by Wollman Rink in a check. It’s as if the now 75-year-old CFO had worked that year at Central Park’s famous skating rink.
As if Weisselberg had worked the previous year at the Palm Beach golf club and Mar-a-Lago as well as “The Apprentice”, the remainder of his bonus was paid out in $50,000 checks to three different payors.
Weisselberg, who testified last week on the stand that these payments were in violation of tax reporting requirements, stated that they were.
In-house, records were carefully kept.Some of the bonuses paid by companies were titled “The Trump Organization Christmas Bonanzas.”
Some of these records bear Trump’s initials. According to documents, he personally approved the annual bonus amounts for Weisselberg, company general attorney Jason Greenblatt, controller Jeffrey McConney and COO Matthew Calamari.
But Trump’s initials are not on spreadsheets detailing what prosecutors say was the illegal part of the scheme — charts detailing which subsidiaries were paying the bonus checks.
Bender, who works for the Mazars accounting firm, testified Tuesday that he never saw these purported heart-attacks-on-a-chart, not until Manhattan prosecutors showed them to him in 2021.
Under cross-examination, Susan Hoffinger, one the lead prosecutors, told jurors that if he had seen these charts, he would have been able to raise alarm.
“It’s possible I would have a heart attack,” he stated, before apologizing and explaining that he meant to be “very worried” and would have alerted Mazars.
The accounting firm Trump Organization and Trump Organization have been cut offearlier in the year, citing a history financial “discrepancies” at the company.
Bender was a defense witness and his testimony could be used to support the defense argument that Trump was also kept in the dark regarding the subsidiaries’ executive bonuses, as if it were outside compensation.
The trial will be off the rest of this week. Bender’s testimony and defense case could be finished Monday. Closing arguments can be made as soon as Tuesday.
Trump is not named as a defendant during the five-week-old criminal case. However, his company could be subject to penalties of up to $1.6million if convicted for conspiracy, scheme to fraud and lying on official records.
