Update 2: The White House has finally responded to the NYTimes story...(via Sarah Sanders)

"Fred Trump has been gone for nearly twenty years and it's sad to witness this misleading attack against the Trump family by the failing New York Times. Many decades ago the IRS reviewed and signed off on these transactions. The New York Times' and other media outlets' credibility with the American people is at an all time low because they are consumed with attacking the president and his family 24/7 instead of reporting the news. The truth is the market is at an all-time high, unemployment is at a fifty year low, taxes for families and businesses have been cut, wages are up, farmers and workers are empowered from better trade deals, and America's military is stronger than ever, yet the New York Times can rarely find anything positive about the President and has tremendous record of success to report. Perhaps another apology from the New York Times, like the one they had to issue after they got the 2016 election so embarrassingly wrong, is in order."

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Update 1: According to CNBC, the New York taxation department is reviewing allegations of fraud.

The New York State Tax officials are investigating allegations detailed in an exhaustive New York Times investigation into Donald Trump and his family's business dealings, CNBC has learned. The Times reported on Tuesday that Trump and his family committed "instances of outright fraud" in order to transfer millions of dollars from the real estate of empire of the presidents father, Fred Trump to his children without paying the appropriate taxes. -CNBC

"The Tax Department is reviewing the allegations in the NYT article and is vigorously pursuing all appropriate avenues of investigation," said a NY Spate Department of Taxation and Finance spokesman to CNBC.

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In a massive, front page story, the NYT has accused President Trump of participating in "questionable" and "dubious" tax strategies "including instances of outright fraud" that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents and allowed him to accrue millions of dollars in additional wealth from his father's real estate empire "much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s."

As one of the authors, NYT reporter Susanne Craig explains, she and Russ Buettner, David Barstow "got our hands on a massive trove of confidential docs - including 200 tax returns - from Fred Trump’s empire. We found Donald Trump received hundreds of millions from his dad, some of it via fraudulent tax schemes."

NEW: Russ Buettner, David Barstow and I got our hands on a massive trove of confidential docs - including 200 tax returns - from Fred Trump’s empire. We found Donald Trump received hundreds of millions from his dad, some of it via fraudulent tax schemes. https://t.co/9is4ZcpOY4 — Susanne Craig (@susannecraig) October 2, 2018

The NYT reported that Trump and his siblings set up a "sham" corporation to help disguise otherwise taxable income that came from gifts from their parents. The president also allegedly helped his father take improper tax deductions that amounted to millions of dollars and helped formulate strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings, with the Internal Revenue Service reportedly providing little pushback against the Trumps' reported tactics.

According to the leaked confidential filings, Trump's parents left more than $1 billion to their children, which would have resulted in a roughly $550 million tax bill at the time. However, the Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million on that source of income, according to the NYT report. To achieve this, the newspaper cited records that showed Trump helped undervalue his father's real estate holdings, which led to a lower tax bill when he and his siblings inherited the properties.

In total, Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, based on questionable tax dealings starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day. And, in what will attract the most attention, the newspaper wrote that Trump's behavior amounted to fraud in some cases.

Trump declined to comment to the Times for the story, and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comments from Bloomberg or other media outlets.

As part of its investigation, The Times interviewed former employees and advisers to Trump’s father and reviewed more than 100,000 pages of documents related to the Trump family business, including bank statements, financial audits and invoices.

Charles Harder, an attorney for the president, said in a statement to The New York Times that allegations of tax evasion are “100 percent false,” adding that Trump “had virtually no involvement” with the tax strategies used by his family, and instead delegated those tasks to others. Harder also implied that the newspaper could face a defamation lawsuit if it suggested Trump participated in a fraudulent tax scheme.

“There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate,” he said. “President Trump had virtually no involvement whatsoever with these matters,” he continued, saying the president had delegated those tasks to relatives and tax professionals. “The affairs were handled by other Trump family members who were not experts themselves and therefore relied entirely upon the aforementioned licensed professionals to ensure full compliance with the law.” “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” Mr. Harder said. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate.”

The Times says that its findings "raise new questions about Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his income tax returns, breaking with decades of practice by past presidents."

According to tax experts, it is unlikely that Mr. Trump would be vulnerable to criminal prosecution for helping his parents evade taxes, because the acts happened too long ago and are past the statute of limitations. There is no time limit, however, on civil fines for tax fraud.

Robert Trump, the president’s brother, issued a statement on behalf of the Trump family and said that all appropriate gift and estate taxes were paid after his parents passed away. Robert Trump said his father's estate was closed in 2001 by the IRS, and that his mother's account was closed in 2004.

"All appropriate gift and estate tax returns were filed, and the required taxes were paid," he said.

Trump drew criticism during the 2016 presidential campaign for his refusal to release his tax returns. The decision marked a break with tradition from presidential candidates dating back decades. More recently, The Hill notes that the president's broader financial dealings have come under scrutiny as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and as his former attorney, Michael Cohen, faces legal woes.

The special counsel's office has reportedly asked about Trump's past financial dealings in Russia, while prosecutors have said that Cohen falsified invoice statements while working for the Trump Organization.

So far Trump tax filings have reportedly not been a focus of Mueller's probe; after the NYT report that may change.

Here are 11 key takeaways from the NYT allegations, via the newspaper:

The Trumps’ tax maneuvers show a pattern of deception, tax experts say

The line between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion is often murky, and there is no shortage of clever tax-avoidance tricks that have been blessed by either the courts or the Internal Revenue Service itself; the wealthiest Americans rarely pay anything close to full freight. The Trumps’ tax maneuvers met with little resistance from the I.R.S., The Times found.

But tax experts briefed on The Times’s findings said the Trumps appeared to have done more than exploit legal loopholes. They said the conduct described here represented a pattern of deception and obfuscation that repeatedly prevented the I.R.S. from taxing large transfers of wealth to Fred Trump’s children.

Donald Trump began reaping wealth from his father’s real estate empire as a toddler

In Donald Trump’s version of how he got rich, he was the master dealmaker who broke free from his father’s “tiny” Brooklyn and Queens real estate operation and built a $10 billion empire that would slap the Trump name on hotels, high-rises, casinos and golf courses the world over. But The Times’s investigation makes clear that in every era of Mr. Trump’s life, his finances were deeply entwined with, and dependent on, his father’s wealth. By age 3, he was earning $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his father’s empire. He was a millionaire by age 8. In his 40s and 50s, he was receiving more than $5 million a year.

There was a clear pattern to this largess: When his son began expensive new projects, Fred Trump increased his help. In the late 1970s, when Donald Trump crossed the river into the glittering precincts of Manhattan — converting the old Commodore Hotel near Grand Central Terminal into a Grand Hyatt — his father opened a spigot of loans. When he made his first forays into Atlantic City casinos a few years later, his father devised a plan to sharply increase the flow of aid.

That ‘small loan’ of $1 million was actually at least $60.7 million — much of it never repaid

In Mr. Trump’s books and TV shows and on the campaign trail, a central trope of his self-mythology has been that, as he began building his own empire, the only financial help he got from his father was a $1 million loan. Not only that: “I had to pay him back with interest.” In fact, The Times found, Fred Trump lent his son at least $60.7 million, or $140 million in today’s dollars. Much of it was never repaid, records show.

Fred Trump wove a safety net that rescued his son from one bad bet after another

As the 1980s ended, Donald Trump’s big bets began to go bust — Trump Shuttle, the Plaza Hotel, the Atlantic City casinos. But as he careened from one financial disaster to another, family partnerships and companies dramatically increased their payouts. Between 1989 and 1992, four of the entities that Fred Trump created paid his son today’s equivalent of $8.3 million. And when Donald Trump pleaded with bankers for an emergency line of credit, he used as collateral the stake his father had given him in a group of apartment buildings.

Tax records also reveal that at the peak of Mr. Trump’s financial distress, in 1990, his father extracted an extraordinary sum — nearly $50 million — from his empire. While The Times could find no evidence that Fred Trump made any significant debt payments, charitable donations or personal expenditures, there are indications that he wanted plenty of cash on hand to bail out his son if need be. That was what happened at Trump’s Castle casino, where an $18.4 million bond payment was due in December 1990. Fred Trump dispatched a trusted bookkeeper to Atlantic City with checks to buy $3.5 million in casino chips without placing a bet. With this ruse — an illegal loan under New Jersey gaming laws, resulting in a $65,000 civil penalty — Donald Trump narrowly avoided defaulting on his bonds.

The Trumps turned an $11 million loan debt into a legally questionable tax write-off

By 1987, Donald Trump’s loan debt to his father had grown to at least $11 million. Had Fred Trump simply forgiven the debt, his son would have owed millions in income taxes. They found another solution — one that appears to constitute both an unreported multimillion-dollar gift and an illegal tax write-off.

That December, records show, Fred Trump spent $15.5 million to buy a 7.5 percent stake in Trump Palace, his son’s condo tower rising on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Four years later, tax returns and financial statements show, Fred Trump sold that stake for just $10,000. The buyer, other documents indicate, was his son.

According to tax experts, with Trump Palace condos selling briskly, selling shares worth $15.5 million to your son for a mere sliver of that would constitute a multimillion-dollar gift under I.R.S. rules. But Fred Trump’s tax returns show no such gift to Donald Trump. What they do reveal is that he used the transaction to declare an enormous tax write-off. That appears to violate federal tax law that prohibits deducting any loss from the sale or exchange of property between family members. In all, Fred Trump dodged roughly $8 million in gift taxes and $5 million in income taxes on the transaction.

Father and son set out to create the myth of a self-made billionaire

All told, The Times documented 295 distinct streams of revenue Fred Trump created over five decades to channel wealth to his son. But the partnership between Donald Trump and his father was about more than the pursuit, and the preservation, of riches. They were also confederates in a more ambitious project: creating the myth of Donald J. Trump, Self-Made Billionaire. If Fred Trump was the silent partner, helping finance the accouterments of wealth, it was Donald Trump who spun them into a seductive narrative.

Emblematic of this dynamic is Trump Tower, the talisman of privilege that established Donald Trump as a player in New York. Fred Trump’s money helped build it. His son recognized and exploited its iconic power as the primary stage for both “The Apprentice” and his presidential campaign.

Donald Trump tried to change his ailing father’s will, setting off a family reckoning

In December 1990, Donald Trump sent his father a document that left him both angered and alarmed. It was a codicil seeking to make a variety of changes to Fred Trump’s will. Among them: strengthening provisions that made Donald Trump sole executor of his estate. But amid Mr. Trump’s financial shambles — it was the month of the $3.5 million Trump’s Castle rescue — Fred Trump feared that the document potentially put his life’s work at risk, that his son might use the empire as collateral to save his own failing businesses, according to depositions given years later during a family dispute.

Fred Trump rebuffed the maneuver, refusing to sign the codicil. But the episode prompted a family reckoning: Fred Trump was aging and ailing. Without speedy intervention, he could die leaving a vast estate — not just his real estate empire, but also tens of millions of dollars in cash — vulnerable to the 55 percent inheritance tax. So with Donald Trump playing a central role, the family formulated a plan that included unorthodox tax strategies that experts told The Times were legally dubious and, in some cases, appeared to be fraudulent .

The Trumps created a company that siphoned cash from the empire

The first major component was creating a company called All County Building Supply & Maintenance. On paper, All County was Fred Trump’s purchasing agent, buying everything from boilers to cleaning supplies. But All County was, in fact, a company only on paper, records and interviews show — a vehicle to siphon cash from Fred Trump’s empire by simply marking up purchases already made by his employees. Those millions in markups, effectively untaxed gifts, then flowed to All County’s owners — Donald Trump, his siblings and a cousin.

Lee-Ford Tritt, a leading expert in gift and estate tax law at the University in Florida, said the Trumps’ use of All County was “ highly suspicious” and could constitute criminal tax fraud . “It certainly looks like a disguised gift,” he said. All County also had an insidious downside for Fred Trump’s tenants. He used the padded invoices to justify higher rent increases in rent-regulated buildings, records show.

Mr. Harder, the president’s lawyer, disputed The Times’s reporting: “Should The Times state or imply that President Trump participated in fraud, tax evasion or any other crime, it will be exposing itself to substantial liability and damages for defamation.”

The Trump parents dodged hundreds of millions in gift taxes by grossly undervaluing the assets they would pass on

With the cash flowing out of Fred Trump’s empire, the Trumps began transferring ownership of the lion’s share of the empire itself to Donald Trump and his siblings. The vehicle they created to do that was a special kind of trust called a grantor-retained annuity trust, or GRAT.

The purpose of a GRAT is to pass wealth across generations without paying the 55 percent estate tax. The Trump parents did have to pay gift taxes based on one crucial number: the market value of Fred Trump’s empire. But The Times found evidence that they dodged hundreds of millions of dollars in gift taxes by submitting tax returns that grossly undervalued the assets placed in two GRATs, one for each parent.

Fred Trump’s 1995 gift tax return claimed that the 25 apartment complexes and other properties in the trusts were worth just $41.4 million. The implausibility of this claim would be made plain in 2004, when banks valued that same real estate at nearly $900 million. “They play around with valuations in extreme ways,” said Mr. Tritt, the tax law expert, who was briefed on The Times’s findings. “There are dramatic fluctuations depending on their purpose.” Mr. Harder, the president’s lawyer, said: “All estate matters were handled by licensed attorneys, licensed C.P.A.’s and licensed real estate appraisers who followed all laws and rules strictly.”

After Fred Trump’s death, his empire’s most valuable asset was an I.O.U. from Donald Trump

When Fred Trump died in June 1999 at the age of 93, the vast bulk of his empire was nowhere to be found in his estate — testament to the success of the tax strategies devised by the Trumps in the early 1990s. The single largest item included in his estate tax return was a $10.3 million I.O.U. from Donald Trump, money his son appears to have borrowed the year before he died. As for the remnants of empire left in Fred Trump’s estate, the tax return cited appraisals that once again grossly understated their market values.

As their father’s executors, Donald, Maryanne and Robert Trump were legally responsible for the accuracy of his estate tax return. They were obligated not only to give the I.R.S. a complete accounting of the value of his estate’s assets, but also to disclose all the taxable gifts he had made during his lifetime. If they knew anything was wrong and failed to reveal it, tax experts said, they could be in violation of tax law. Mr. Harder, the president’s lawyer, defended the tax returns filed by the Trumps. “The returns and tax positions that The Times now attacks were examined in real time by the relevant taxing authorities,” he said. “These matters have now been closed for more than a decade.”

Donald Trump got a windfall when the empire was sold. But he may have left money on the table.

In 2003, once again in financial trouble, Donald Trump began engineering the sale of the empire Fred Trump had hoped would never leave the family. The sale, completed in 2004, brought him his biggest payday ever from his father: His cut was $177.3 million, or $236.2 million in today’s dollars. But as it turned out, banks at the time valued the empire at hundreds of millions more than the sale price. Donald Trump, master dealmaker, had sold low.