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A House committee made public six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns Friday, the culmination of years of legal wrangling and speculation about what might be contained in the filings.
The House Ways and Means Committee had voted to make the thousands of pages of returns public in a party-line vote last week, but their release was delayed while staffers redacted sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers from the documents.
The panel’s top Republican, Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, has called the release of the documents “unprecedented,” and said it will “jeopardize the right of every American to be protected from political targeting by Congress.”
In a video statement last Friday, Trump called the planned release “an outrageous abuse of power,” and falsely claimed that Democrats had “illegally obtained and leaked my personal tax returns, which show only that I’ve had tremendous success.”
Some of the returns were also from Trump’s businesses. A 39-page report from the Joint Committee on Taxation released last week included summaries from Trump’s personal tax forms and business entities, which showed he’s been paying relatively little in taxes.
For example, in 2020, Trump appeared to owe nothing in taxes, the report showed. That was thanks to Trump claiming $15 million in business losses, which resulted in him having negative $4 million in adjusted gross income. Trump then claimed a $5 million refund.
Trump reported millions in negative income in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2020, and he paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017.
In 2019, Trump and his wife, Melania, reported significant losses of more than $16.4 million but reported a total income of $4.4 million.
The committee report also listed several overarching issues it believed the IRS should have investigated. For example, Trump claimed large cash donations to charities, but the report said the IRS did not verify them. The report also said that while Trump’s tax filings were large and complicated, the IRS does not appear to have assigned experts to work on them.
The Ways and Means Committee separately released a 29-page report summarizing its investigation into an IRS policy that mandates audits of returns filed by presidents and vice presidents. The committee found that the IRS had largely not followed its own internal requirements, beginning to examine Trump’s returns only after the House panel inquired about the process. Just one year of Trump’s returns was officially selected for the mandatory review while he was in office, and that audit of Trump’s 2016 taxes was not complete by the time he left the White House, according to the report.
An audit of Trump’s 2015 taxes was started shortly before the 2016 audit in 2019 — the same day the Ways and Means committee asked for information on the mandatory audits. Neither the 2015 audit nor audits of Trump’s 2017-19 taxes that began after he left office were marked as being part of the audit program, and as of last month, none had been marked as completed either, the committee said.
The committee obtained Trump’s tax returns in November, following a yearslong court fight for documents that other presidents have routinely made public since the 1970s.
The dispute ended up at the Supreme Court, which rejected Trump’s last-ditch plea to block the release of his tax records to House Democrats in a brief order handed down just before Thanksgiving.
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Trump’s refusal to release his returns led to a swirl of suspicions about what he might be trying to hide — foreign business dealings, a smaller fortune than he’d claimed publicly or paying less in taxes than the average American.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump maintained that he couldn’t release his returns because they were under audit, and that he would make them public when it was completed — a vow he walked away from after he took office.
Information about his taxes has dripped out over the years.
In October 2016, The New York Times published some of Trump’s 1995 state taxes and reported that he’d declared a $916 million loss that year. Three tax experts hired by the paper said the size of the loss and tax rules governing wealthy filers at the time could have allowed Trump to legally pay no federal income taxes for 18 years.
After Trump took office in 2017, reporter David Cay Johnston went on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” with what he said were two pages of Trump’s Form 1040 from 2005.
The documents, which were published on Johnston’s site DCReport.org, showed that Trump had paid $38 million in federal income tax on more than $150 million in income.
In September 2020, the Times reported that it had obtained two decades of Trump’s tax information, which showed he had not paid any income taxes in 10 of the prior 15 years, mostly because he reported significant losses. In the year he won the presidency and his first year in office, he paid just $750 in federal income tax, the paper found.
Asked about the report at the time, the then-president said the story was “made up” and that he’s “paid a lot of money in state” taxes. He later tweeted that he’d “paid many millions of dollars in taxes but was entitled, like everyone else, to depreciation & tax credits.”
Trump also fought unsuccessfully to keep his tax information out of the hands of investigators in New York, who were probing his business practices. That clash also went all the way to the Supreme Court, which denied Trump’s attempt to block a grand jury from getting Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns in February of last year.
Those returns helped prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office build a tax fraud case against Trump’s company, the Trump Organization. The company was convicted this month of carrying out a 15-year tax fraud scheme that prosecutors said was orchestrated by top executives at the company.
During the trial, Trump’s accountant Donald Bender testified that the former president had losses totaling $900 million in 2009 and 2010.
The company is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 13. Trump, who was not charged in the case, has dismissed the allegations and conviction as part of a politically motivated “witch hunt.”
