The House Ways and Means Committee is releasing six years of tax returns for Donald Trump and what may also be several business entities associated with him this upcoming Friday morning, according to new reports.
The panel previously voted in favor of releasing information from the filings contained in part in a report from a Congressional body known as the Joint Committee on Taxation, but copies of the documents themselves remained forthcoming. According to CNN, a brief procedural session of the House scheduled for Friday morning will see copies of the returns entered into the Congressional Record, and the committee itself is expected to make another announcement at that time. Some of what the panel already released was troubling, including the detail that Trump went two years of his presidency without audits from the IRS required under a policy demanding tax audits of every president no matter who they are. Barack Obama was audited eight times, so it wasn’t just that the agency was broadly letting that responsibility slip.
Other details in what the panel released include that Trump paid nothing in personal income taxes in 2020 and just $750 in both 2016 and 2017, although his personal tax bills were sometimes much higher. He repeatedly claimed huge amounts in losses offsetting the large amounts of income he made and bringing his bills down. For instance, he told officials he saw $16 million in losses for 2020, several million dollars ahead of his stated income. Under half a million in his income from that year was a salary, with the rest spread across sources like investment returns. The copies of Trump’s returns set for release this week will be scrubbed of personally identifying info like Social Security numbers.
The panel obtained the records under federal rules allowing certain figures in Congress to in general obtain the tax returns for any American, and releasing copies of these materials is also specifically allowed under federal law, although it’s obviously not routine. Still, there aren’t any major changes to the law underlying what the panel is doing. Trump said it’s illegal to release someone else’s returns, which might be true for Joe Smith on the corner but isn’t here.
Trump’s business also remains the target of a civil lawsuit from the state attorney general in New York alleging years of misrepresented valuations for dozens of company assets — deception that would have helped provide the Trump family business with unearned benefits on taxes and loans. Letitia James, the law enforcement official pursuing the case, wants the return of hundreds of millions she tied to the deception and a ban on Trump or his three most prominent adult children leading a business in New York in key executive positions ever again.
