House Ways and Means chairman Richard Neal released a report about the Internal Revenue Service’s audits of Trump’s taxes late on Tuesday, but the actual tax returns will be made public in a few days after the redaction of personal information, such as Social Security numbers.
Tuesday’s action by the Ways and Means Committee – over the objections of the panel’s Republicans – comes in the waning days of the House Democratic majority and one day after another House panel recommended that Trump face criminal prosecution in connection with the Capitol insurrection.The panel, which has an eight-seat Democratic majority, agreed on a party-line vote to release information from Trump’s personal and business tax returns from 2015 to 2020.
“This was not about being punitive, this was not about being malicious,” Neal said about the committee’s decision to pursue and release the information. “The IRS only had one agent on, you know, 400 pass-through returns. And so it’s like no surprise that they did a very shallow, shallow audit, at least so far,” Representative Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat, told reporters. “So there’s the notion of if you’re going to do it on someone with a tax return that complex, you’re going to need to devote the resources.”
Though candidates for the US presidency aren’t required by law to show voters their tax returns, they have done so for decades as a gesture of transparency. Trump was the exception.