The Democrat-led panel voted in a closed session to release six years of records pertaining to the former president.
A committee in the United States House of Representatives voted to release years of tax returns obtained from former President Trump to the public after long years of legal and political battle that started when he was still president.
The Ways and Means Committee, a body that oversees tax-related issues, voted 24-16 in what was seen as the last opportunity for the panel to consider the issue.
A summary of Trump’s tax returns between 2015 and 2021 when he was contested for president and was serving in the White House will be partially redacted and subsequently released, said the chairman Richard Neal, a Democrat from Massachusetts.
“We worry this will unleash a cycle of political retribution in Congress,” said Texas’s Kevin Brady, the leading Republican on the committee, in the lead-up to the vote.
It will also lead to further scrutiny of Trump who has publicly declared he will run for another term as president by 2024.
Title 26 of the US Code decrees that the US Treasury Department “shall furnish” the committee with “any return or return information” it requests.
The Treasury Department, however, did not release Trump’s tax records. And Trump had initially claimed he could not disclose the documents since there were still under IRS audit.
The committee, however, concluded that the IRS did not follow its own rules when it failed to audit Trump’s tax returns while he was in office.
While its report indicated that the Trump administration may have disregarded an IRS requirement dating back to 1977 that makes it mandatory for a president’s tax filings to be audited. IRS only began to audit Trump’s 2016 tax filings on April 3, 2019, more than two years into his presidency and just months after Democrats took control of the House.
The committee’s investigation is one of several involving Trump’s business dealings. The Times reported that Trump paid only $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017, and no income taxes in 10 of the last 15 years, after claiming millions of dollars in losses.
Trump denied the Times’ findings, saying, “It’s fake news, it’s totally fake news. Made up. Fake.”
Neal described the Times’ reporting as a reflection of the inequality in US society and called for his committee to continue its pursuit of Trump’s tax records.
“This reporting shines a stark light on the vastly different experience people with power and influence have when interacting with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) than the average American taxpayer does,” Neal said in a statement at the time.
“It appears that the President has gamed the tax code to his advantage and used legal fights to delay or avoid paying what he owes.”
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