![]() ![]() New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit in September 2022 against Trump and the Trump Organization, alleging financial fraud. The committee’s investigation is one of several involving Trump’s business dealings. “This rises above politics, and the Committee will now conduct the oversight that we’ve sought for the last three and a half years.” “We knew the strength of our case, we stayed the course, followed the advice of counsel, and finally, our case has been affirmed by the highest court in the land,” Neal said in a statement. Neal, the committee chairman, applauded the decision, calling it a victory for government oversight. On November 22, the Supreme Court lifted the freeze without noting any dissent, allowing the committee to access the tax records. On November 1, Chief Justice John Roberts announced that the US Supreme Court would temporarily pause the documents’ handover, as the court considered the arguments surrounding the case. The Trump legal team responded with an emergency motion to stop the release. But lower courts sided with the committee, asserting that it had broad authority to obtain tax documents. To stop that from happening, Trump took his fight to the courts, arguing he was the subject of a politically motivated attack. In 2020, Trump lost his bid for a second consecutive term as president, and the incoming administration of Democrat Joe Biden signalled its support for the Ways and Means Committee’s ability to review any taxpayer’s returns, including the president’s. Trump’s decision not to release his tax records marked a significant break in bipartisan tradition, dating back to the 1970s, when major presidential candidates like Jimmy Carter started to publish their tax returns. But the report found that the audit process was “dormant, at best”. There was no suggestion that Trump sought to directly influence the IRS or discourage the agency from reviewing his tax information. While its report indicated that the Trump administration may have disregarded an IRS requirement dating back to 1977 that mandates audits of a president’s tax filings, the 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. ![]() ![]() However, the committee found that the IRS did not follow its own rules when it failed to audit Trump’s tax returns during three of his four years in office. And Trump had previously claimed he could not disclose the documents, as he was under an IRS audit. ![]() Title 26 of the US Code decrees that the US Treasury Department “shall furnish” the committee with “any return or return information” it requests.īut the Treasury Department at the time refused to release Trump’s tax records. The committee had initially requested the tax returns in 2019, as part of an investigation into then-President Trump’s tax compliance and the audit programme run by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). It will also lead to further scrutiny of Trump, who recently announced his intentions to run for another term as president in 2024.Īt stake were six years of tax returns for the former president and some of his business, part of a three-year-long political fight over the documents. “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. Republicans have denounced Tuesday’s vote as partisan. The House of Representatives is set to shift to Republican control in January, following November’s midterm elections. The Ways and Means Committee, a body responsible for overseeing tax-related issues, voted 24-16 in a closed-door session on Tuesday, in what was seen as the last opportunity for the Democrat-led panel to broach the issue.Ī summary of Trump’s tax returns between 20 – when he was running for president and serving in the White House – will be partially redacted and released within days, said the committee’s chairman Richard Neal, a Democrat from Massachusetts. A committee in the United States House of Representatives has voted to publicly release years of tax returns obtained from former President Donald Trump, capping a years-long legal and political battle that started when he was in the White House. ![]()
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