Former President Donald Trump arrives an event at Mar-a-Lago on Nov. 18, 2022, in Palm Beach, FL. The Democratic-led House Ways and Means committee released six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns on Friday, Dec. 30, 2022.(REBECCA BLACKWELL/AP)
The Democratic-led House Ways and Means committee released six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns on Friday, marking the culmination of a nearly four-year investigation and a bruising legal battle that made it to the Supreme Court.
The returns will likely inspire new scrutiny of Trump’s financial dealings, which have been cloaked in mystery for years. Trump fought vigorously to keep the returns a secret, and their release comes as he seeks a second term in the White House amid headwinds from even those within his own party.
The publication also comes in the waning days of Democrats’ control of the House, as Republicans gear up to take back control of the chamber next week – a turnover that will shutter the committee’s investigation into Trump’s taxes and many like it.
The cache published Friday includes Trump’s personal tax returns from 2015 to 2020, the years he was either running for or was president. The Ways and Means Committee obtained the records after a lengthy investigation they said recently was centered on the failure of the Internal Revenue Service to audit Trump during his first two years in office in violation of their own policy.
Two reports published by the Ways and Means Committee earlier this month revealed that Trump for years paid little or no taxes as he claimed massive business losses.
The tax returns have been of interest to Democrats since Trump announced his candidacy for president. He was the first candidate and first president in modern history to not release his personal tax returns, prompting speculation that he may be shielding controversial or even suspect financial transactions.
The documents published Friday include thousands of pages of tax returns, which will take time to analyze. The returns will provide a detailed look at Trump’s financial dealings and how he reported those dealing to the IRS, though top-line numbers and conclusions, including red flags identified by tax experts, were released on Dec. 20 in the two reports published by the Ways and Means Committee.
The returns are the first look at Trump’s taxes while he was president, though a New York Times investigation in 2020 provided insight into his taxes over the two decades prior. Both sets of documents reveal that Trump paid little or no taxes for many years and consistently recorded large business losses.
It’s unlikely that the new returns will provide any major, stunning new revelations about Trump’s tax practices given the information already published by both the Ways and Means Committee and The New York Times, says Edward McCafferty, a professor of law, economics and political science at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law and an expert in tax law.
“The devils live in details, and there will be more eyes on the details,” McCafferty says. “But the overview is pretty clear: He does not pay much taxes. In many years, he pays no taxes.”
The returns show massive business losses, which reveal Trump to be a “very bad businessman,” McCafferty says.
Trump has appeared sensitive to conclusions about his business acumen and preemptively took to social media to warn that his tax returns should not be interpreted as an indicator of his wealth.
Trump paid $750 in taxes in both 2016 and 2017, and nothing in 2020. In 2018 and 2019, Trump paid roughly $1 million and $133,000 in taxes, respectively. Those were also the only two years from 2015 to 2020 that the former president reported a positive income, with a large influx of income in 2018 coming after he sold some $22 million in property and investments.
The information in the returns show “aggressive tax planning” that in some cases may be suspect, McCafferty says.
“Throughout all of Trump's aggressive tax planning, certainly pushing against the lines of propriety and you know, almost certainly exceeding those lines in at least some cases,” McCafferty says.
One of the biggest revelations from the Ways and Means Committee report was that the IRS did not audit Trump until 2019, after Democrats had begun investigating. Both former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden have said that they were routinely audited by the IRS, and it is IRS policy to mandate an audit of the president. Trump had insisted for years that he could not release his returns because he was being audited.
The Ways and Means Committee report sharply criticized the reluctance of the IRS to audit Trump. It remains an outstanding question as to why exactly IRS policy wasn’t followed in Trump’s case.
The second report the panel released was prepared by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan committee of tax experts. That panel found several questionable items in Trump’s returns that members said warranted more investigation.
Those red flags include transactions with his children, which were reported as interest he received from them as a result of personal loans. The committee questioned if the loans were actually disguised gifts meant to evade gift taxes and benefit his children. The report also said the IRS had investigated $21 million Trump paid to settle fraud claims related to the now-shuttered Trump University.
Trump has railed against the committee’s decision to release the returns and the Supreme Court’s rulings during the investigation.
In a statement Friday, he said the release of the returns would lead to “horrible things for so many people.”
“The Radical Left Democrats have radicalized everything, but remember, that is a dangerous two-way street!” Trump said. “The ‘Trump’ tax returns once again show how proudly successful I have been and how I have been able to use depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive for creating thousands of jobs and magnificent structures and enterprises.”
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