That wealthy people are able to exploit all manner of tax loopholes is well known. Most of these loopholes do not occur by accident but are inserted by lawmakers at the instigation of lobbyists. One of the most common areas for such loopholes is in real estate because there is so much ambiguity about valuations that can be fiddled with endlessly. Trump used those loopholes all the time and was found guilty of it in one case but escaped many others.

ProPublica writes about someone who specialized in these kinds of shady dealings many times who has now been made a senior adviser to the General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s property, even though he pushed a scam that the IRS called the “Worst of the Worst”.

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.

In 2020, the Senate Finance Committee released a bipartisan investigative report on the transactions. (Schuler was one of six people subpoenaed by the committee to provide information.) The report, which detailed Ornstein-Schuler’s practices, described syndicated easements as a “dollar machine” for wealthy taxpayers, saving them two dollars in taxes for every dollar they put in, “with promoters pocketing millions of dollars in fees for organizing the deals.” The practice was finally curbed through legislation passed in late 2022, but it remains on the IRS’ “Dirty Dozen” list of “bogus tax avoidance strategies.”

“This is someone who made his money by ripping off American taxpayers and who shouldn’t come anywhere near a position of authority over tax dollars,” commented Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who helped oversee the Senate investigation, in a written statement after being told about Schuler’s appointment. “He’ll fit right in with the Trump administration.”

Yep, he will fit right in with the Trump crowd because the corruption runs wide and deep.