“I think the most important finding is that there is a lot more allegation in the indictment than people previously realized,” said Jampol, attorney with Epstein Becker Green.
The indictment alleges that it is not only because Weisselberg did not properly report his wages. It states that the Trump organization as a company was complicit.
The company kept internal records of employee compensation, and those records listed Weisselberg’s rent, tuition fees for his grandchildren, his cars, and other items as part of his compensation package. The company even reduced Weisselberg’s paychecks to account for the indirect compensation he received in the free rent, the indictment said.
However, this compensation was recorded differently in the company’s general ledger and was not reported to the tax authorities, according to prosecutors.
“There’s the set that was the formal ledger and there’s the set that Weisselberg’s compensation calculations were,” Jampol said.
Smaller cases with similar practices are not uncommon. A Queens plumber company was sentenced to 20 months in prison just last month. Sergei Denko was found to have cashed $ 5 million checks to fund a payroll system that avoided paying around $ 732,000 in wage tax. A Long Island restaurant owner was convicted in September for also avoiding $ 130,000 in wage taxes.