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 lady who was “adored.”

Nevertheless, the Trump household has been accused of getting ulterior motives for selecting the golf course as Ivana’s closing resting place — motives that might 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 house.

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 primary clubhouse.”

Might 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 a complete 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 revenue tax.

Cemetery property can also 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 stories.

Brooke Harrington, a tax researcher and professor of sociology at Dartmouth, stated 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 crucial for the tax breaks to kick in.”

“Seems to be like one corpse will suffice to make a minimum of three types of tax vanish,” she stated.

Is Trump planning a much bigger onsite cemetery?

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

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

“Mr. Trump … particularly selected this property for his closing 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 personal 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 website that will 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 option 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, fairly than $462 an acre.

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

In the meantime, paperwork filed by the New York legal professional normal earlier this year accused the Trump Group of massively misrepresenting the worth of a few of its largest property to be able to safe loans, insurance coverage and tax breaks.