Trump paid 1.1 million in taxes while he was president but nothing in 2020. On Wednesday, a House Committee report revealed that President Donald Trump paid $1.1 million in taxes during his presidency but $0 in 2020, ending the former president’s efforts to keep his tax returns secret after a protracted legal battle over them.
Last month, the IRS handed over six years’ worth of the former president’s tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee, which had asked for them as part of its investigation into the IRS’s presidential tax return auditing procedures.
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The committee, led by Democrats, met on Tuesday to discuss releasing the records. This may have been the committee’s final opportunity to do so before the Republican Party takes over the chamber and its committees in January. It followed the Supreme Court’s denial of Trump’s legal team’s request to stop efforts to keep the returns secret.
Trump, who declared last month that he would run for president in 2024, had argued that turning over the documents would “undermine the separation of powers” and that House members’ true intent was to make them public rather than use them as part of an internal audit.
However, in 2020, the New York Times was able to obtain a copy of his tax returns, which showed that he had not only paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 but also that he had not paid any taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years because he had declared losses in those years.
CONTRA
Trump’s tax returns were made public at the same time the House Ways and Means Committee reported that the IRS failed to properly audit Trump during his first two years in office, as required for all presidents in office. According to the House report, the IRS had only begun an audit two years into Trump’s presidency and had not finished any during his tenure, with Committee Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.) dubbing the audit program “dormant.”