How Donald Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money Into His Business
Dan Alexander , FORBES STAFF
JUN 6, 2017 @ 11:58 AM
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THE COSTS FOR ERIC'S golf tournament quickly escalated. After returning, in 2012, to a more modest $59,000--while the event brought in a record $2 million--the listed costs exploded to $230,000 in 2013, $242,000 in 2014 and finally $322,000 in 2015 (the most recent on record, held just as Trump was ratcheting up his presidential campaign), according to IRS filings. This even though the amount raised at these events, in fact, never reached that 2012 high.
It's hard to find an explanation for this cost spike. Remember, all those base costs were supposedly free, according to Eric Trump. The golf course? "Always comped," he says. The merchandise for golfers: "The vast majority of it we got comped." Drinks: "Things like wine we were normally able to get donated." And the evening performances from musicians like Dee Snider of Twisted Sister and comedians like Gilbert Gottfried: "They did it for free." So many sponsors donated, in fact, that the event invitation has carried enough logos to make a Nascar team proud.
Eric Trump, in speaking with Forbes, maintains that "our expenses on a tournament that made us somewhere in the $2 million range every year was somewhere around 100 grand," even though his foundation's tax records show costs soaring to $322,000. When asked for an itemized list of expenses, the Eric Trump Foundation declined to respond.
Thus it's hard to figure out what happened to the money. All the listed costs are direct expenses: Items like overhead and salaries appear elsewhere in its IRS filings. Even if the Eric Trump Foundation had to pay the full rate for literally everything, Forbes couldn't come up with a plausible path to $322,000 given the parameters of the annual event (a golf outing for about 200 and dinner for perhaps 400 more). Neither could golf tournament experts or the former head golf professional at Trump National Westchester. "If you gave me that much money to run a tournament, I couldn't imagine what we could do," says Patrick Langan, who worked at the club from 2006 to 2015. "It certainly wasn't done that way."
Opaque accounting doesn't help, as the Eric Trump Foundation began hosting a few other golf events and fundraisers; former board member Kaupp says some were lumped into the cost figures of the Westchester event on the IRS filings. Hundreds of thousands of dollars over this time went directly to the Trump Organization, including one payment of $87,000 to Trump's golf course in Washington, D.C., which hosted a separate event for St. Jude.
For his part, Eric Trump offers no indication that the charity is paying for much beyond the day in Westchester. "I'm sure if I hunted, I could find examples of expenses associated with the charity that aren't due to day-of activities," he says. "But I would probably have to think pretty long and hard about that."
more:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2017/06/06/how-donald-trump-shifted-kids-cancer-charity-money-into-his-business/#5fabc7246b4a
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