“Across Mr. Trump’s business, he uses a similar web of privately held LLCs and other entities to house his assets—everything from real estate to a vintage carousel in Manhattan’s Central Park, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of hundreds of pages of his corporate filings and personal financial disclosures. Fifteen entities, for example, are used to hold his interests in two airplanes and three helicopters.”
“Unlike publicly traded companies, Delaware LLCs don’t have to publish any financial information or even disclose the identity of the owner… None of the 96 LLCs examined by the Journal appear to regularly release audited financial statements. That opacity—compounded by Mr. Trump’s decision to break with decades of precedent by declining to release his tax returns—makes it impossible to gauge the full extent of potential conflicts between his business interests and presidential role.”
It is time for the Delaware General Assembly to end this practice of corruption. But it is likely they won’t for this very simple reason:
One reason Delaware has resisted any change to this system: It’s a huge part of the state’s income. According to The New York Times, taxes and fees from these absentee businesses accounted for a quarter of the state’s budget in 2011. In 2015, the Delaware’s secretary of state retained the huge lobbying firm Peck Madigan Jones to lobby on “legislation impacting corporate formation process” and “issues relating to beneficial ownership,” priced at $50,000 per quarter. The state also retained Peck Madigan Jones to lobby on beneficial ownership in 2009; the firm has been retained by the state since 2009 to lobby both the House and Senate on other issues, too, paying as much as $90,000 a quarter.
The Delaware General Assembly is addicted to this revenue because it allows them to ignore the non-progressive flat tax system we have for upper incomes here in Delaware. Instead of raising revenue through adding additional income tax rate levels between $60k and $6M in yearly income, the Delaware General Assembly would rather further enable people like Donald Trump to avoid paying taxes.