Trump Vowed to Clean Up Washington, Then His Team Hired a Man Who Pushed a Scam the IRS Called the "Worst of the Worst"
Source: ProPublica
Trump Administration
Trump Vowed to Clean Up Washington, Then His Team Hired a Man Who Pushed a Scam the IRS Called the “Worst of the Worst”
Frank Schuler was a leading promoter of a tax deduction derided as a scam by prosecutors, senators and the IRS. Now he’s a senior adviser to the General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s property.
by Peter Elkind
Feb. 18, 2025, 6 a.m. EST
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Even as he has vowed to eliminate “every dollar of waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal budget and operations,” the new acting administrator of the General Services Administration, Stephen Ehikian, has appointed a senior adviser whose firm used to specialize in tax transactions that a bipartisan Senate committee excoriated and that the IRS branded as “abusive” and among “the worst of the worst tax scams.” The adviser has been battling the tax agency in court over $4 billion in disallowed deductions for thousands of his clients.
The GSA, the federal agency responsible for managing the government’s land and property, will now be taking advice from Frank Schuler IV, the 57-year-old co-founder and longtime president of Ornstein-Schuler, an Atlanta-based real estate investment company. Schuler’s firm was for years among the most prolific promoters of tax-shelter deals known as “syndicated conservation easements.” ... Schuler and his colleagues exploited a tax deduction that was created to reward landowners who give up development rights for their acreage, usually by donating those rights to a nonprofit land trust. When used as intended, conservation easements can preserve pristine land, sometimes as a park that the public can use, and reward the land donor with a charitable tax deduction.
But middlemen like Schuler’s firm turned the tax provision into a highly profitable business, packaging easements into what were essentially outsized tax deductions for purchase. After snatching up a cheap piece of vacant land, Schuler and others typically hired a private appraiser willing to declare that the property had huge untapped development value — that it was suited to become anything from a gravel mine to a luxury resort — and was worth many times its purchase price. They then sold stakes in the easement donation to rich individuals, who claimed wildly inflated tax deductions based on the appraisal, cutting their taxes by twice as much as they’d invested. ProPublica first began investigating the syndicated easement business, which has cost the government tens of billions in tax revenue, back in 2017.
The IRS, the Justice Department and Congress struggled for years, through public warnings, hundreds of audits, tax court cases and criminal prosecutions, to shut down the scheme. Those efforts were countered by $11 million in lobbying expenditures from the promoters and the creation of a Washington-based trade group, called Partnership for Conservation, which Schuler founded. Syndication advocates pressed Congress to defund the IRS crackdown.
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Read more: https://www.propublica.org/article/frank-schuler-gsa-doge-syndicated-conservation-easements-tax-scam
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... and they're sending their kids to "Trump University."
