Trump’s tax returns released online via Ways and Means Committee

On Friday, the House Committee on Ways and Means released six years of former President Donald Trump’s federal tax returns. The tax documents date from the period from 2015, when Trump first announced his candidacy, to 2020, which was his last full year as president.

Trump’s tax forms, both personal and for his businesses, are available on the committee’s website in a zip file just over 1 GB.

Throughout his presidency, Trump has said he is being audited by the Internal Revenue Service and will provide his tax forms once the financial review is complete. However, the committee’s chairman, Rep. Richard Neal, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said the IRS had not begun an audit when Trump claimed it.

“We now know that the first mandatory audit was opened two years into his presidency,” Neal said in a statement Friday. “That same day, this committee asked for their feedback. This is a major failure of the IRS under the previous administration, and certainly not what we were hoping to find.”

No law requires presidents to disclose their tax returns, but presidents have done so regularly voluntarily since Richard Nixon half a century ago.

The committee requested Trump’s 2019 tax returns, but only received the forms last month after a lengthy legal battle. A committee report released earlier in December showed Trump reported negative income in 2015-17 and 2020, and paid $750 in income taxes each year for 2016 and 2017, then $999,466. $ for 2018, $133,445 for 2019 and zero for 2020.

The former president released a statement on his Truth Social account, saying the returns show how successful he was and how he used tax deductions to create jobs, structures and businesses.