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Donald Trump’s tax returns show how the former president used a range of write-offs in the US tax code to pay little or no federal income tax, according to six years of records released Friday by a House panel.
The returns, which include his personal and business filings from 2015 to 2020, are the first complete look into Trump’s tax records for the years he was running for office and in the White House. The release comes just days before Democrats relinquish their House majority, which will end much of their ability to investigate him.
The documents, which have been the subject of litigation for more than three years, shed light on the sources of the former president’s earnings and the taxes he paid — or didn’t.
In 2020, Trump paid nothing in federal personal income tax. He also reported large losses at his businesses in multiple years thanks to favorable deductions that allowed him to minimize his tax bills. Congress’s nonpartisan tax experts have said some of those deductions warrant more scrutiny.
The release on the Friday before New Year’s weekend failed to land any immediate knockout blow Democrats were seeking as Trump seeks another term in the White House.
“We don’t have any smoking gun,” said Sam Brunson, a law professor at Loyola University in Chicago.
Yet even some of the most sophisticated tax specialists won’t immediately be able to tell if Trump followed the law, experts said, because tax returns don’t automatically include some of the underlying documentation that the Internal Revenue Service can request in an audit. Auditors can get a much deeper understanding because they get to see the calculations that back up a number on a return, said Jo Anna Fellon, a tax partner at accounting firm Marcum.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Fellon said. “I’m not sure we’ll ever get the full picture.”
Court Fight
Trump, who fought in court to block the release, said in a statement Friday that the documents show how “proudly successful” he has been as a businessman and touted his wide-ranging use of the tax code, including “depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive for creating thousands of jobs and magnificent structures and enterprises.
