Just days before the US House of Representatives flips to Republican control, House Dems have released former President Donald Trump’s tax returns from 2015-2020, which he has gone to painstaking lengths in recent years to keep from going public. While details remain scarce as reporters wade through thousands of pages of documents, reports recently released by the US House Ways and Means Committee showed that Trump was not audited by the Internal Revenue Service in 2016. He had claimed the audit was why he was forced to buck the trend of presidents releasing their tax returns. That report also showed that in 2016 and 2017 the former president paid just $750 in federal income tax, declaring losses topping more than $12 million. It also revealed that he paid a total of $1.1 million in federal income tax in the first three years of his presidency but zilch in 2020. After examining these findings, the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation recently urged the IRS to look into whether money the former president loaned to his children – which he claimed were gifts – should have been taxable. Looking ahead, tax analysts will be focusing on whether any of Trump’s tax policies from his time in office aimed to benefit his own financial arrangements.
