Donald Bender is the first defense witness in the tax fraud trial.
He said he would have had a heart attack if he had seen how the bonuses were paid.
The district attorney says the bonuses were a tax-dodge.
The accountant for the Trump Organization testified on Tuesday that he would have been shocked if he had seen the company's Christmas bonus payments.
Donald Bender, who did the company taxes for 35 years, said on Tuesday that he probably would have had a heart attack.
In the trial, jurors have heard that Donald Trump personally signed stacks of bonus checks that were stuffed into the holiday cards of company executives.
Prosecutors are trying to prove that the bonuses were part of a 15-year payroll tax dodge scheme.
The bonuses should have been reported on the company's W-2s. Prosecutors have accused them of being not.
Prosecutors alleged that executives received the bulk of their annual bonuses in separate checks from a variety of Trump Organization subsidiaries, as if they had worked the previous year as a contractor for one of the Trump Organization subsidiaries.
The company was able to save on withholding and write off the checks as subsidiary expenses. The executives were able to put some of the money in tax-free savings accounts for the self-employed because they were able to claim the checks as their own.
In 2015, the Trump Organization paid out over a million dollars in bonuses and over a million dollars in bonuses to its CFO.
Weisselberg claimed compensation on his W-2 wage statement for that year.
The CFO received a check from the famed Central Park skating rink in the form of a bonus.
Weisselberg's bonus was paid in $50,000 checks with three different payors, as if he had worked for the Palm Beach golf club, Mar-a-Lago, and "The Apprentice" the previous year.
Weisselberg testified that the payments violated tax reporting requirements.
Records of how company bonuses were paid were kept inside.
Some of the records have Trump's name on them. According to documents, he personally approved the total bonus amounts to be received by executives such as Weisselberg.
The illegal part of the scheme, according to prosecutors, was the charts detailing which subsidiaries were paying the bonus checks.
The man who works for the Mazars accounting firm testified Tuesday that he didn't see the heart-attacks-on-a-charts until Manhattan prosecutors showed him them in 2021.
Under cross-examination by Susan Hoffinger, one of the lead prosecutors, he said he would have sounded an alarm if he knew the extent of the scheme.
He apologized for the hyperbole and said he would have been very concerned if he had had a heart attack.
The accounting firm severed ties with the Trump Organization due to a history of financial discrepancies.
The defense could use the testimony of a witness to argue that Trump was kept in the dark about the bonuses.
For the rest of the week, the trial is not going on. The defense case could be finished Monday and the testimony could be finished Tuesday.
If Trump's company is found guilty of conspiracy, scheme to defraud, and lying on official records, it could be fined up to $1.6 million.
Business Insider has an article on it.
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