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The long journey to release Trump's taxes

 


Former President Donald Trump's tax returns have been released, ending a six-year-long battle to gain more insight into his finances.

The returns span from 2015 to 2020, covering Mr Trump's candidacy and time in the White House.

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

The BBC is reviewing the documents.

Responding to Friday's release of thousands of pages of tax returns, Mr Trump's camp warned the revelations would make the US political division "far worse".

"The Democrats should never have done this, the Supreme Court should never have approved this, and it's going to lead to terrible things for so many people," his statement said.

Since his entry into politics, critics have been eager to get Mr Trump – his fundamental pitch to voters was that his business success made him the best choice to run the country – to show that his wealth is actually How do I look?

He firmly refused.

Democrats who control the House of Representatives and oversee the release argued it was a necessary act of oversight.

Representative Don Baer, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee who released the document, said on Friday that Mr Trump "abused the power of his office to block basic transparency on his finances and conflicts of interest, which were denied under Nixon." No president has left since."

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 did so only after congressional oversight proceedings began in 2019. began.

Here's where to get the disclosures made public.

Trump defied tradition

For decades, presidential candidates and office bearers have released their tax returns to the public in the interest of transparency and accountability.

The long-standing tradition is "primarily about trying to assure the public that presidents are being free of conflicts and entanglements, and that taxes are like a window into someone's financial soul," nonpartisan tax policy said Steve Rosenthal, senior fellow at the center.

But Mr. Trump "broke all norms," Mr. Rosenthal said, by refusing to release his tax returns as a candidate when he ran for office in the 2016 presidential election.

His fiery insistence on the matter invited scrutiny and speculation among critics that he had something to hide – could it be that Mr Trump was not as wealthy as he claimed, or that he paid less tax Was that what they should have done?

Meanwhile, supporters supported his right to privacy. After all, there is no legal requirement for a candidate to release his or her tax return.

New York Times investigation

But during and after his presidency, the public is slowly beginning to gain some insight into Mr. Trump's personal tax history.

A great deal of those revelations came from an investigation published in 2020 by the New York Times, which obtained Mr Trump's tax returns from the first two decades of his time in office. The documents provided unprecedented insight into Mr Trump's businesses.

They revealed that he paid very little federal income tax during that period, and that Mr. Trump had reported in his tax filings that his businesses lost significant amounts of money - a reflection of his publicly publicized financial success. Despite claiming In 2017, the Times reported, Trump paid just $750 (£623) in federal income tax, despite being a billionaire.

Mr Rosenthal said the New York Times reporting "calls into question whether he is a billionaire, or whether there are any tricks he uses to avoid paying taxes, legal or not."

image copyrightReuters

Taking the fight to the Supreme Court

Meanwhile, in Washington, Democrats began using their powers to scrutinize Mr Trump after he gained control of the House of Representatives in early 2019.

The Ways and Means Committee fought for three years to obtain Mr Trump's tax returns.

The battle went all the way up to the US Supreme Court this year, and in November, judges refused to block the release of Mr Trump's tax returns to the committee, paving the way for his release.

On December 21, the committee voted to release the tax returns received to the public, with the vote splitting along party lines.

• Trump tax returns to be made public, panel votes

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• Trump trade deficit sharply reduced his tax bill

The tax documents were released on Friday, days before Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, potentially signaling the end of any sustained effort to look into Mr Trump's finances for the foreseeable future.

It is possible that the US Senate, which is controlled by Democrats,

Source link bbc news



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