Then-US President Donald Trump smiles while speaking alongside House Ways and Means Committee chairman Kevin Brady of Texas (R), and Ways and Means ranking member Richard Neal of Massachusetts (L) during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on September 26, 2017.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
The Democratic-majority House Ways and Means Committee voted to make materials related to Trump’s tax returns public.
Trump broke with precedent during his 2016 run by refusing to release his tax returns.
The committee held its meeting behind closed doors.
House Democrats voted on Tuesday to publicly release materials related to former President Donald Trump’s personal tax returns, a stunning loss for the embattled former president after years of fighting to protect his finances from public scrutiny.
The committee voted 24-16, along party lines, to submit the tax filings to the US House.
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Kildee of Michigan told reporters on Capitol Hill that the panel would be releasing two reports covering the IRS audit program of presidential tax returns, legislative recommendations to strengthen tax transparency, and the six years of Trump’s tax filings — after all personally identifying information has been redacted.
Kildee anticipated the redactions would take hours but not spill into several days.
The outcome caps a protracted legal battle that involved heated exchanges on Capitol Hill, ping-ponging throughout the court system — culminating in a US Supreme Court stacked with three Trump appointees denying his last-ditch appeal for political cover — and lots of “see-they’re-out-to-get-me” messaging from the uncooperative Trump White House.
The committee opened its hearing publicly for a few minutes before proceeding with a closed-door meeting that took more than four hours. House Ways and Means Committee chairman Richard Neal said after the vote on Tuesday evening that the redacted inforamtion would include social security numbers, street addresses, personal identification numbers, and banking information.
“Did we have enough time to conduct the review? Yes we did,” Neal told reporters after the meeting, praising Ways and Means staff for combing through the trove of documents in under a month.
He also revealed that the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation — a scorekeeping agency — also assisted with the review, and said its findings would be reflected in one of the two forthcoming reports.
“We think the mandatory audit program needs to be bolstered and boostered,” Neal said of the work that needed to be done at IRS.
Retiring Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida, who also served on the Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol voted for the release of Trump’s tax filings.
The information may for the first time reveal the exact details of Trump’s personal wealth, his tax payments, and his charitable giving — or could contain a summary. Some of this was already revealed in 2020 when The New York Times obtained decades of Trump’s tax information. The Times’ reporting revealed that Trump reported losing vast sums of money over an extended period and that he paid no federal income tax for years.
US presidents have voluntarily released the financial snapshots since the 1970s in order to ward off any appearance of impropriety.
US Treasury officials gave Neal Trump’s tax filings for 2015-2020 in late November. He put in for access to the sensitive financial records in April 2019, asking the Internal Revenue Service to share the information so the committee could review the agency’s auditing process.
“After a long process, this was not about being punitive, it was not about being malicious, and there were no leaks from the committee,” Neal said at the conclusion of the vote. “We adhered carefully to the law.”
The unusual use of congressional authority to examine private tax returns came about after scandal-plagued Trump bucked decades of tradition by refusing to publicly release his filings while running for president in 2016, and throughout his single term in office.
Trump’s go-to argument had been that he was under audit. But the IRS automatically audits all US presidents to search for any potential conflicts of interest, so in that respect, Trump was no different from any of his predecessors.
But Democrats also revealed on Tuesday that they found Trump had not been under audit. Neal told reporter the IRS presidential audit program had been “non-existent,” adding that no one reviewed Trump’s taxes at the agency. Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas told CNN that “the IRS did no audits at all until such time as they received” the document request from Neal.
Democratic Rep. Judy Chu also said the only time the mandatory presidential audit program kicked in during the Trump years was when Neal wrote the IRS a letter asking about it.
“And none of the audits were completed,” she said of the lack of follow through by the federal tax agency.
The twice-impeached former president recently announced that he’s running again in 2024. The House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 siege at the US Capitol pressed the Department of Justice to criminally prosecute him for inciting the violent riot.
The Trump Organization, Trump’s family-run business, was found guilty of tax fraud earlier this month. The verdict means Trump’s company now risks up to $1.6 million in penalties on its January 13 sentencing date.
The company also now has felony status, meaning a big black eye as Trump makes his third consecutive run for president.
Neal and other Democratic tax writers have been deliberating about how to handle Trump’s tax documents for weeks. Panelists who participated in a December 2 meeting seemed to retreat into two camps that afternoon: publish everything and proceed with caution.
Retiring House Ways and Means Committee ranking member Kevin Brady has been pushing the latter for years, pleading with Neal to abandon the tax disclosure hunt once Democrats reclaimed control of the House in 2019.