Brooklyn College Professor Daniel Tinkelman said he is seeking the court’s permission to file an amicus brief in an appeal of the civil fraud ruling stemming from a case originially filed in 2022 by New York Attorney General Letitia James against President Donald Trump and his family real estate business, including its former CFO, Allen Weisselberg.
The litigation is now before the New York State Court of Appeals after both sides earlier this year appealed a divided ruling from the Supreme Court of the State of New York. That August 2025 decision rejected a lower court ruling requiring Trump and his company to pay nearly a half billion dollars in faud penalties as “excessive,” Bloomberg reported. However, the N.Y. Supreme Court upheld the finding that Trump fraudulently inflated the value of his properties.
Tinkelman, a tenured accounting professor who is writing a book on the case, said he would like to contribute to the court’s understanding of the matter in order to protect accounting’s integrity. “I am concerned that the court could endorse some really bad accounting practices,” he told CFO Dive in an email Tuesday. “If people can report wildly over-optimistic figures without being held accountable, financial statements will become worthless.”
In March the professor lost his bid to get the Financial Accounting Standards Board to pursue research and a potential update to standards that govern the preparation of personal financial statements that were highlighed in the civil fraud case filed by James against Trump.
The litigation is still winding its way through the courts over two years after Judge Arthur Engoron ordered the Trump Organization, Trump and other defendants pay over $300 million in penalties.
That decision came after the judge issued a pretrial ruling in the fall of 2023 establishing James had satisfied her burden of establishing liability on the part of Trump and the other defendants related to their use of fraudulent documents, which inflated the value of many of Trump’s signature real estate assets, CFO Dive previously reported.
Tinkelman argues in the proposed brief filed with the court that two of the issues he plans to bring up would support the AG’s position, while a third would buttress the Trump group’s case.
In the filing, he urges the court to reject Trump and his attorneys’ interpretation of estimated current value of his properties, stating that the notion that such values can be based on planned changes to the property is illogical and not found in accounting principles.
“I urge the Court to reaffirm the foundational principle that estimates in financial statements must be made in good faith,” he wrote in the filing dated Oct. 20. “Applicable accounting and auditing standards make clear that generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) do not permit unsupported or biased ‘estimates.’”
However, Tinkelman disagreed with how penalties were calculated, noting that they did not take into account the basis that the Trump organization had in some of the assets sold.
“The evidence cited above is insufficient to compute profits at the dates of the sales,” he said in the filing. “However, if it is approximately correct, Defendants’ net gains from the sales of the two properties may be closer to $70 million than to the $194 million awarded. The Court should not let the awards for these properties stand unaltered. “
Attorneys for Trump, Weisselberg and the AG’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
