The House Ways and Means Committee plans to release Donald Trump’s tax returns Friday, a spokesperson for the committee said Tuesday.
The committee voted to make the returns public in a party-line vote last week, and it initially planned to release the documents as early as last Wednesday, but the disclosure has been delayed as staffers are still redacting sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers from the documents.
The assortment of six years of Trump's personal returns and some of his business returns are expected to be placed into the Congressional Record on Friday as part of the House’s pro forma session. The latest delay was first reported by CNN.
The clock is ticking for the committee, which will turn over control to Republicans when the new Congress is sworn in next week.
The committee obtained the returns in November after years of court fights for the closely held documents, which other presidents have routinely made public for the last four decades.
Trump’s refusal to release his returns led to a swirl of suspicions about what he was trying to hide — foreign business dealings, a smaller fortune than he’d claimed publicly or whether he was paying less in taxes than the average American.
The dispute ended up at the Supreme Court, which rejected Trump’s last-ditch plea in a brief order handed down just before Thanksgiving.
A 39-page report from the Joint Committee on Taxation released last week showed Trump had been paying relatively little in taxes, including only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 and none in 2020.
The report also found that despite an IRS policy that presidents are supposed to undergo mandatory audits, the agency didn't begin reviewing his taxes until after the Ways and Means Committee asked for information about the mandatory audits in 2019.
