Donald Trump avoided reporting millions of dollars in taxable income: US newspaper

A leading US newspaper has claimed that Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income in early 1990s by using a tax avoidance man oeuvre that was considered "legally dubious".

In a special report, the newspaper said while the legal manoeuvre was later outlawed by the Congress, Trump used it to potentially escape paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes.

The report cited tax experts as saying that the manoeuver "trampled a core tenet" of American tax policy by conferring enormous tax benefits to Trump for losing vast amounts of other people's money -- in this case, money investors and banks had entrusted to him to build a casino empire in Atlantic City

Trump has boasted that he did not pay federal income taxes for years on end by exploiting tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire.

Trump did not respond to the report but his spokeswoman Hope Hicks told that the newspaper’s questions suggest "either a fundamental misunderstanding or an intentional misreading of the law.

"Trump does not think that taxpayers should file returns that resolve all doubt in favor of the I.R.S. And any tax experts that you have consulted are engaged in pure speculation. There is no news here," Hicks said.