Extract from ABC News
After a years-long legal battle that reached the US Supreme Court, a congressional committee has published Donald Trump's redacted federal income tax returns.
On Friday morning, local time, the House Ways and Means committee released six years of the former president's tax records, including from his four years in the White House.
The trove of documents follows two recent reports published by the Democrat-led committee, which has been investigating if the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sufficiently scrutinised Trump's finances while he was president.
"A president is no ordinary taxpayer," Representative Richard Neal, who chairs the committee, said in a statement on Friday.
"They hold power and influence unlike any other American.
"And with great power comes even greater responsibility."
The reports showed the IRS conducted only one mandatory audit of Trump's federal income tax returns, which it began two years into his presidency and never completed.
That was despite the former president paying $US750 ($1,100) in federal income taxes in his first year in office and none in his final year, while claiming huge losses that helped limit his tax bill.
In 2018 and 2019, he paid roughly $US1.1 million in total.
"We anticipated the IRS would expand the mandatory audit program to account for the complex nature of the former president's financial situation yet found no evidence of that," Mr Neal said.
"This is a major failure of the IRS under the prior administration, and certainly not what we had hoped to find."
Why does it matter how much tax Trump did — or didn't — pay?
Trump's tax returns give a rare, unvarnished insight into the finances of the real estate mogul turned reality TV star.
By refusing to release them when he ran for office in 2016, he broke decades of presidential precedent and fuelled speculation about his financial entanglements.
Presidents have volunteered the information since the early 1970s when Richard Nixon gave his tax returns to Congress after the IRS was criticised for not applying necessary oversight to his filings.
"Every president has released his taxes and all of our candidates do," said Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
"And those taxes are a window to the financial character of our presidents.
"They tell us so much in terms of potential conflicts, generosity, or a variety of questions that pop up, including honesty."
Mr Rosenthal says whether a person respects tax laws shows if they view taxes as a shared responsibility or a sport.
"I think Trump's already told us he views taxes as a sport," he said.
"That's disappointing to me, a tax policy wonk."
During a televised debate with presidential rival Hilary Clinton in 2016, Trump memorably claimed he was "smart" for not paying federal income taxes.
He has fought bitterly for years in court to keep his filings secret, while claiming to be a self-made billionaire.
"The Democrats should have never done it, the Supreme Court should have never approved it, and it's going to lead to horrible things for so many people," Trump said in a statement on Friday.
"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."
In a separate video statement, he labelled the release of his tax returns "an outrageous abuse of power".
The move by the House Ways and Means committee coincides with the final meeting of the US House of Representatives before the new Congress begins next week, under Republican control.
The committee obtained Trump's filings from 2015 through 2020 in November, after the Supreme Court ruled in its favour, voting last week to make them public with sensitive information redacted.
Several Republicans have already threatened to retaliate by releasing tax information related to President Joe Biden's family, including his son Hunter.
What will tax experts be looking for?
Much of the information Trump provided in his tax returns was already made public by the Ways and Means committee in a December 15 report by the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), which advises politicians on tax issues.
The JCT found Trump and his wife Melania paid little or no tax some years, consistently offsetting millions of dollars in reported earnings by claiming even bigger losses.
"What stands out to me most is the losses that Donald Trump reported every single year for the period 2015 to 2020," said Mr Rosenthal, who testified before the Ways and Means committee in 2020.
"His businesses just lost money consistently. Sometimes $US8 million. Sometimes $US17 million, at the upper end. But always a lot of money."
The exception was in 2018, when Trump paid nearly a million US dollars, after receiving a windfall from the sale of his father's 1970s investment in a Brooklyn housing development, as well as other properties he and his siblings inherited.
In other years, his reported income was derived from investments, capital gains and interest payments.
The recent fluctuations in Trump's financial fortunes are consistent with how his businesses performed throughout the 1990s and 2000s, according to Mr Rosenthal, who referenced a blockbuster 2020 investigation into Trump's chequered career by the New York Times.
"And the fundamental question is: Are these losses legitimate?" he said.
"Is Trump just a consistently poor businessman who generates a lot of real losses, or is Trump somehow inflating his losses?
"Either circumstance is not a good story for Donald Trump."
What other red flags were revealed?
Aside from the staggering losses, the JTC pointed to several other potential red flags hidden within Donald Trump's joint tax filings with his wife Melania.
Those include transactions with three of his children, Donald Jr, Ivanka and Eric, who paid their father tens of thousands of dollars in interest on "personal loans", which may have been set up to avoid taxes on gifts.
It also questioned a $US21 million deduction Trump made on money he paid to settle fraud claims over his defunct Trump University, as well as whether he had charged personal costs as business expenses.
In 2020, the New York Times found he had written off more than $US70,000 for hair styling during his time on The Apprentice, for example.
"The devil is in the detail," said Francine Lipman, a professor of law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
"And when you look at a tax return … it's one or two pages with aggregate numbers.
"One of the reasons we have an audit system in the US is that taxpayers can put a number on a tax return, right, but the taxpayer has the burden of proving the detail."
Ms Lipman said while Trump's tax-avoidance tactics were in some ways standard practice in the real estate industry, "like pretty much everything Mr Trump does, he's doing it to excess".
"He's using arguably other people's money, banks to buy real estate assets and then using that debt, that leverage to take big deductions through depreciation.
"And so, depreciation is a legitimate tax deduction.
"But again, Mr Trump really does it a bit to extremes in that his depreciation deductions are significant, and the generating losses are just kind of nonstop."
Did the IRS drop the ball?
The release of the tax filings is the culmination of nearly four years of work by the Ways and Means committee.
Its investigation also raised significant questions about the internal operations of the IRS under the Trump administration.
In its December 20 report, the committee found the IRS flouted its own 1977 rule by failing to conduct mandatory audits of the president's finances.
"During the prior administration, it was clear that the mandatory audit program was not a priority and was not provided with the resources needed to ensure compliance by the former president," the report stated.
According to the report, an internal IRS memo noted: "With over 400 flow-thru returns reported on the Form 1040, it is not possible to obtain the resources available to examine all potential issues.
"To do a thorough review of these returns, we would need a team much larger than the current team," it said.
The committee examined more than 1,100 files related to the IRS's handling of Trump's taxes, painting a picture of an agency either unable or unwilling to examine the complicated issues raised.
When the IRS belatedly began its only, still-incomplete audit of Trump's tax records, it assigned a single agent to the task.
That was despite Trump having far more complicated filings than other presidents, due to his decades as a businessman in New York, where his family business was recently convicted of tax fraud.
"The IRS's own manual requires the IRS to audit the president each year expeditiously," Mr Rosenthal said.
"That didn't happen."
He also said the IRS "effectively outsourced" the audits to Trump's own lawyers and accountants.
"That's a big mistake and quite embarrassing in my view," he said.
The committee released the details of its investigation alongside Trump's tax filings, calling on Congress to step in, as well as proposing legislative reforms.
"Our work has always been to ensure our tax laws are administered fairly and without preference," Mr Neal said in the accompanying statement.
"Because at times, even the power of a president can loom too large."
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