Donald Trump’s first wife, Ivana, was buried in a gold casket at the former president’s New Jersey golf club last month, following an Upper East Side funeral service where she is remembered as a woman “beloved”.
However, the Trump family has been accused of having ulterior motives for choosing the golf course as her final resting place — motives that could benefit the family patriarch’s finances.
Trump’s first wife — and mother of three grown children Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric—passed away in July.
She was laid to rest at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, according to the New York Postreports that her grave is “not too far from the main club house.”
Could Ivana’s resting place benefit Trump financially?
Documents published by ProPublica shows that the Trump Family Trust previously sought to designate an estate in Hackettstown — about 20 miles from the golf course where Ivana is buried — as a nonprofit cemetery corporation.
Defining a golf course as a cemetery can allow a business to reduce taxes altogether.
According to New Jersey lawLand being used for cemetery purposes is exempt from property and personal property taxes, as well as sales, inheritance, business, and income taxes.
Cemetery assets are also exempt from sale to collect judgment, with cemetery trusts and trust income exempt from both taxes and proceeds from the sale or seizure to collect judgment against the company.
Does a grave qualify for a golf club to become a cemetery?
Ivana Trump is the only known person to have been buried right here at Trump National Golf Club, according to reports.
Brooke Harrington, a tax researcher and professor of sociology at Dartmouth, said in a tweet Sunday that using the golf course as a cemetery is “a tax avoidance.”
She added that in New Jersey, “there is no set minimum [number] human resources are still needed for the tax breaks to take effect. “
“It seems like one corpse would be enough to make at least three forms of taxes disappear,” she said.
Is Trump planning to build a larger cemetery on the campus?
A representative from the Trump Organization told Luck in an email on Monday that the links made between Ivana Trump’s grave site and the tax law were “really evil.”
Trump himself has previously expressed a wish to be buried at his New Jersey golf club, talk to New York Post in 2007, he wanted to rest in “beautiful land” Bedminster.
“Mr. Trump… specifically chose this property as his final resting place because it is his favorite property,” his company wrote in a 2014 filing. seen by Washington Post.
The filing sought approval to build a 10-lot private family mausoleum at Trump National Golf Club.
Resistance from local planners is said to have led to withdraw and resubmit the proposed burial sites Over the years, with Trump’s ideas ranging from a small but posh family mausoleum to a 1,000-acre graveyard it is possible to see plots of land for sale to members of the golf club.
Has Trump been accused of tax evasion before?
While registering the golf course as a cemetery would be tax-free, the former president found a way to cut his tax bill for the New Jersey club by registering it as a ranch, Huffington Post report in 2019.
Trump is said to own several goats and hay farms at the resort, which reduces his tax bill by about $88,000 a year, according to one Huffington Post analysis.
Under the agreement, the golf course was taxed at just over $6 an acre in 2019, instead of $462 an acre.
A year earlier, the New York Times report that Trump used various techniques to evade taxes on the fortune he inherited from his father.
Meanwhile, documents filed by the New York attorney general this early year accused the Trump Organization of misrepresenting the value of some of its largest assets to secure loans, insurance and tax breaks.
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