US House Committee releases Trump’s tax returns

Former US President Donald Trump’s tax returns have been released, ending a six-year long battle to gain greater insights into his finances.

The returns stretch from 2015 through 2020, covering Mr Trump’s candidacy and time in the White House.

They give details of various entities through which he would have paid tax, including holdings companies and personal income.

Responding to Friday’s release of thousands of pages of tax returns, Mr Trump’s camp warned that the disclosure will lead to the US political divide becoming “far worse”.

Representative Don Beyer, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee which released the documents, said on Friday that Mr Trump “abused the power of his office to block basic transparency on his finances and conflicts of interest which no president since Nixon has foregone.”

The committee also found that the Internal Revenue Service – the US federal entity charged with tax collection – failed to audit Mr Trump during his first two years in office, and only began doing so after congressional oversight proceedings were started in 2019.

In an analysis of the documents, it confirmed that Mr Trump paid no federal taxes in 2020 and only $750 (£622) in 2016 and 2017.

However, he paid close to $1m in 2018.

Previously released figures show that Mr Trump paid a total of $1.1m (£906,587) in federal income taxes from 2016 to 2019, all but $1,500 of which was paid in one year. He paid no taxes in 2020, the final year of his presidency.