This does clear up why they kept a separate record of the payments. They didn't want to overpay him but left a trail of bread crumbs for Vance.
As alleged by prosecutors in the charging documents, the Trump Organization lowered the level of income taxes for at least some of its executives, and payroll taxes for the company, by converting some of their salaries into other benefits.
Then, the documents alleged, they hid those benefits from tax authorities, reporting only the part of the salaries that appeared on paychecks. They said Weisselberg alone got more than $1.7 million of untaxed income.
But at the same time, according to charging documents, the Trump Organization wanted to make sure it did not overpay Weisselberg beyond the $940,000 he was supposed to make every year.
The result was the spreadsheets, in which the company allegedly tracked how much of Weisselberg’s salary had been converted into untaxed pay, the charging documents claimed.
“Weisselberg received the benefit of these payments, and the Trump Organization internally tracked and treated many of them as part of his authorized annual compensation,” prosecutors wrote in the indictment. The goal, they said, was “ensuring he was not paid more than his pre-authorized, fixed amount of gross compensation.”
The indictment did not describe the spreadsheets in detail or say whether the untaxed benefits allegedly given to other executives were tracked in the same way.
Legal experts said it was rare in tax-fraud cases to find that a company had kept clear records of its actions.
“You’ve got to get behind somebody’s mind. Did they understand what they were doing?” said Philip Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who previously worked in the IRS’s Office of Chief Counsel.
Hackney said that — if prosecutors are accurately describing the Trump Organization’s internal spreadsheets — those records would be strong evidence that Weisselberg knew the untaxed payments were income. “You’ve got a physical manifestation of knowledge,” he said. “Which is a pretty uncommon thing to have.”
AI
