Donald Trump paid nothing in personal income taxes in 2020 according to information from his returns released earlier this week following a vote by the House Ways and Means Committee.
For years, that panel sought several years of Trump’s personal and business returns, through a refusal by what was then the Trump administration to comply with a federal law allowing the release of individuals’ tax information to certain leaders in Congress followed by challenges in court from Trump. The U.S. Supreme Court, even with three of Trump’s own picks currently serving, recently declined to further block the committee obtaining the materials. What was already made available includes details summarized in a report from a Congressional entity called the Joint Committee on Taxation. Copies of the returns minus personally identifying information would be coming later.
Trump’s low tax bills — in 2016 and 2017, he paid just $750 in personal income taxes despite reporting tens of millions in 2016 income and another huge amount in the following year — stem from large losses that he reported. He told authorities he saw $16 million in losses for 2020, several million dollars ahead of his stated income. One of the largest losses he claimed was in 2015, when he told tax officials he had seen an over $76 million loss. According to available info, losses he claimed in these returns stem from hundreds of millions in losses originally identified a little over a decade prior. Details seem to indicate that he didn’t use those losses all at once in lessening his personal tax bill, instead stretching it for years. Losses Trump is claiming on his personal tax returns could stem in part from depreciation.
Another issue revealed this week is that Trump went the first two years of his presidency without the IRS auditing his personal returns, despite a policy mandating examinations by the agency of any president’s filings. Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden have both been audited every year of their respective stints in office, indicating it’s not just about the agency broadly failing to implement the policy. Questions previously emerged regarding how two top foils of Trump at the FBI, including James Comey and Andrew McCabe, ended up subjected to highly intensive audits for which the selection process is supposed to be random and stretch across the entirety of the country. Out of tens of millions of returns made each year, only thousands were picked for those audits in both years Comey and then McCabe were placed under intensive agency scrutiny.
