There were also cases of potential fraud. The most overt involved a shell company called All County Building Supply & Maintenance, which “siphoned millions of dollars from Fred Trump’s empire” by marking up the cost of goods and bumping up rent increases. Another egregious example: Fred Trump sent a bookkeeper to Atlantic City to buy more than $3 million in casino chips, a cash infusion that helped his son Donald avoid defaulting on his bond payments.

A lawyer for President Trump denied any wrongdoing and distanced the president from the allegations, and the White House has dismissed the story. “The Failing New York Times did something I have never seen done before,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “They used the concept of ‘time value of money’ in doing a very old, boring and often told hit piece on me. Added up, this means that 97% of their stories on me are bad. Never recovered from bad election call!”

But the evidence is clear, and the ramifications broad. The story demonstrates how wealthy families wriggle out of taxes through means both licit and illicit, starving the government of tax revenue, making the tax code less progressive than it is designed to be, and effectively increasing the tax burden on lower-income families and businesses. In so doing they also exacerbate wealth inequality, which the tax code currently encourages with its minimal taxes on inheritances and gifts and its large loopholes for the wealthiest of the wealthy.

Economists have found that the richer a family, the more effective it is likely to be at tax evasion. Indeed, in one study, the richest 0.01 percent were shown to evade about 25 percent of their taxes, several times the rate seen in the general public. “Taking tax evasion into account increases the rise in inequality seen in tax data since the 1970s markedly,” the economists Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman concluded.

An easy fix would be to have the Internal Revenue Service crack down on the kind of fine-print shenanigans and creative accounting methods used by the Trump family, which would lower inequality, raise government revenue, and restore the tax burden on the wealthiest. But in the past decade, Congress has slashed the IRS’s budget, leaving it less capable of conducting audits, let alone finding and punishing cases of fraud. The agency’s enforcement staff has dropped by a third in recent years. As a result, business owners—such as the Trump family—underpay their taxes by an estimated $125 billion a year. That amounts to a trillion-dollar stealth tax cut on the very wealthy, something Congress did not seek to fix in the sweeping tax law it recently passed.

The ultrarich inhabit what the academic Brooke Harrington describes as a “parallel world of selective lawlessness: selective in that the super-rich can continue to enjoy the benefits of laws that suit their interests while ignoring laws that inconvenience them.” But that need not be the case. Stronger laws and better enforcement would make the system more fair for everyone.