US lawmakers released Donald Trump’s tax returns on Friday, ending a years-long battle by the former president to preserve his personal finances as he prepares to return to the White House in 2024.
The Republican leader — who lost his re-election bid while serving a single term from 2017-2021 — broke with tradition by refusing to release the memo, sparking feverish speculation about what it might contain.
The House Ways and Means Committee released a summary earlier in December of the six-year filing, from 2015 to 2020, as part of its investigation into the president’s audit program.
The documents show that Trump is not regularly audited by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and, despite reporting millions in income, he pays little in taxes by claiming large business losses.
“The ‘Trump’ tax return once again shows how successful I am and how we can use depreciation and various other tax cuts as an incentive to create thousands of jobs and wonderful structures and companies,” Trump said in a written statement. statement to CBS News.
The return itself released on Friday is not expected to produce sensational new revelations, but Democrats hope it will add details about Trump’s business and especially foreign concerns that could lead to conflicts of interest.
“In terms of the absorption of top products into the US, Russia makes up a fairly disproportionate cross-section of many of our assets,” the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., reportedly told New York real estate. conference in 2008.
“Say, in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo, and everywhere in New York. We see a lot of money coming from Russia.
The House Ways and Means Committee voted on Dec. 20 to release all of Trump’s 2015-2020 returns, ending a four-year battle between Democrats and the former president that eventually reached the Supreme Court.
The summary shows that the 76-year-old billionaire usually claims huge annual deficits.
He paid $1.1 million in federal taxes in 2018 and 2019, the middle two years of his presidency, after making about $30 million in asset sales.
But this reduced the bill by $750 in 2017 – and he paid nothing because the losses increased in 2020.
The report also shows that Trump has carried back net operating losses of $105 million in his 2015 return, $73 million in 2016, $45 million in 2017 and $23 million in 2018 to reduce his tax liability.
The New York Times claimed in 2020 that Trump had not paid income taxes for 10 of the past 15 years after reporting huge losses.
A separate congressional report on the IRS’s mandatory presidential audit program showed that it was off duty during most of Trump’s time in office.
“The IRS opened only one mandatory audit from 2017 to 2020 for refunds while the former president was in office,” the report read.
The IRS began auditing Trump the day Democratic Ways and Means requested tax information in 2019.