Trump's CPA: 'Secret X'Mas Bonus List Could Cause Heart Attack

The first defense witness in the Trump Org. tax-fraud trial is outside accountant Donald Bender of Mazars USA. He testified Tuesday he "would have had a heart attack" if he'd seen how the company paid X-mas bonuses, Laura Italiano reported for Insider.

Photo Insert: The bonuses should have been reported in their entirety on company W-2s each year, as taxable income but they were not.

Executives got bonuses in piecemeal checks signed by Trump, in what the district attorney (DA) says was a tax dodge.

"I probably would have had a heart attack," Donald Bender, who did the company taxes for 35 years, told a Manhattan jury on Tuesday.

For years, former President Donald Trump personally signed stacks of bonus checks that were then stuffed into the holiday cards of favored company executives, jurors have already heard in the trial.

But the yearly executive bonus handouts were part of a 15-year payroll tax dodge scheme that reached right to the top of the company, prosecutors are trying to prove.

The bonuses should have been reported in their entirety on company W-2s each year, as taxable income.

But they were not, prosecutors have charged. Instead, prosecutors alleged executives received the bulk of their annual bonuses in separate checks from a variety of Trump Organization subsidiaries, as if they had worked the previous year as freelancers or contractors for Wollman Rink, Mar-a-Lago, the Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach, Florida, and even Trump Productions, which produced "The Apprentice."

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