Trump tax returns will be publicly available, US House panel votes

• Six years’ worth of Donald Trump’s tax returns will be made public.
• The former president has made a significant effort to conceal his tax records.
• US presidents are not obligated by law to submit their tax returns.

Six years’ worth of Donald Trump’s tax returns will be made public, according to a committee vote in the US House of Representatives.

The decision by the US Supreme Court last month ends a nearly four-year legal campaign by Democrats to access the documents.

Even though US presidents are not obligated by law to submit their tax returns, they have been doing so voluntarily for decades.

The former president has made a significant effort to conceal his tax records.

On Tuesday night, the US House Ways and Means Committee voted 24–16 to disclose the records, with all Democrats in favour and all Republicans against.

Brendan Boyle, a Democrat from Pennsylvania who served on the committee, said following the vote: “This is one of the most significant votes I will ever cast as a member of Congress, and I stand by it 100%.”

But the committee’s top Republican, Kevin Brady, claimed that Democrats had just “unleashed a dangerous new political weapon.”

The congressman from Texas declared, “Congress’ enemies list is back.” “Every American taxpayer who may fall out of favour with the Congressional majority is now in jeopardy.”

When the public will be able to view the financial records from the years 2015 to 20, when Mr. Trump was a candidate for president and in office, is unknown.

According to Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat on the panel, releasing the papers could take “a few days” due to the need to redact sensitive data including Social Security numbers.

The tax returns may give a detailed picture of Mr. Trump’s financial situation, including his assets, sources of income, charity giving, and liabilities, which may include loans due to foreign organisations.

Since Richard Nixon in 1972, Mr. Trump has been the only major-party nominee for president who has declined to make his tax returns available to the public while running for government. He promised to do so back then, following the conclusion of an Internal Revenue Service audit.

Democrats on the panel, however, asserted on Tuesday that Mr. Trump was not in fact the subject of an audit in 2016 and that the Internal Revenue Service did not start their official audit until 2019.

When Democrats took control of the lower chamber of Congress in 2019, the House Ways and Means Committee requested the returns for the first time. The committee said that the information was required as part of a study of federal tax legislation and cited a federal provision that allowed it to ask for special access to individual tax returns.

Republican detractors, on the other hand, have said that these justifications serve as a cover for accessing Mr. Trump’s financial records.

The US Supreme Court upheld an appeal court finding that the Democrats were entitled to the returns in an unsigned opinion after the Trump administration refused to cooperate with the committee’s request. This put an end to the protracted legal struggle that had been raging.

The New York Times was given unauthorised access to 18 years’ worth of Mr. Trump’s tax returns in 2020. The newspaper revealed that the president paid only $750 (£615) in federal taxes each of his first two years in office and no federal taxes for 10 of those 18 years. It also revealed that the former president had a legal dispute with the IRS about the validity of a $72.9 million tax refund he had requested, even though he had more than $400 million in debt that was due by 2024.

At the time, a spokesman of Mr. Trump’s corporate empire refuted the report’s veracity. The issue should be resolved once the former president’s official tax returns are made public, which is now anticipated to happen before Republicans take control of Congress on January 3.

The vote occurs the day after a Democratic-led congressional panel requested that the former president be charged with insurrection and other crimes in connection with a riot by his supporters at the Capitol in Washington, DC, last year.

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