Donald Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in the year he was elected US president, according to a New York Times report. The banner headline on the paper’s website on Sunday - "Trump taxes show chronic losses and years of tax avoidance." The year he secured the presidency, Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes. He paid another $750 in his first year in the White House.

In 10 of the previous 15 years, he had paid no income taxes at all, mainly because he reported losing much more money than he produced.

The Presidents of the United States are not forced by law to disclose details of their personal finances. But everyone has done so since Richard Nixon.

The New York Times said the tax data that it had seen "provides a road map of revelations, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars the president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow."

The Times also said the documents it had obtained “comprise information that Mr Trump has disclosed to the IRS, not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.”

At a White House press briefing on Sunday, Donald Trump dismissed the Times report as totally false. He said: “We went through the same stories, you could have asked me the same questions four years ago, I had to litigate this and talk about it.

He said that, “Totally fake news, no. Actually, I paid tax. And you’ll see that as soon as my tax returns - it’s under audit, they’ve been under audit for a long time. The (Internal Revenue Service) does not treat me well … they treat me very badly. You have people in the IRS - they treat me very badly.”

Donald Trump further added that, “The New York Times tried it, the same thing, they want to create a little bit of a story. They’re doing anything they can. That’s the least of it. The stories that I read are so fake, they’re so phony.”

Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, told The New York Times in response that "over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015."