Trump tax returns will be made public, US House panel votes

A committee in the US House of Representatives has voted to make public six years of Donald Trump's tax returns.

The move caps a nearly four-year legal battle by Democrats to obtain the documents, which was ultimately decided by the US Supreme Court last month.

US presidents are not required by law to release their tax returns, but for decades they have done so voluntarily.

The former president has fought hard to shield his tax returns.

The returns could offer a first-hand look into Mr Trump's finances, including his assets, sources of income, charitable contributions and liabilities, including the possibility of loans owed to foreign entities.

In 2016, Mr Trump became the first major-party presidential nominee since Richard Nixon in 1972 to decline to publicly release his tax returns while campaigning for office. At the time, he said he would do so after an Internal Revenue Service audit had concluded.

The House Ways and Means Committee had first sought the returns when Democrats took over the lower chamber of Congress in 2019. The committee, citing a federal law allowing it to request special access to individual tax returns, said the information was necessary as a part of a review of federal tax law.

Republican critics, however, have countered that such explanations were merely an excuse to access Mr Trump's financial documents.

Publicly releasing those returns would lead to the weaponisation of the tax information of political opponents, including private citizens, for partisan advantage, they have argued.

The Trump administration refused to co-operate with the committee's request, prompting a drawn-out legal battle that ended when the US Supreme Court, in an unsigned opinion, upheld an appellate court ruling that the Democrats were entitled to the returns.

In 2020, the New York Times obtained leaked copies of 18 years of Mr Trump's tax returns. In a series of articles on the topic, the newspaper reported that the president paid no federal taxes in 10 of those 18 years and only $750 (£615) in each of his first two years in the White House. It also disclosed that the then-president was in a fight with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9m (£59.8m) tax refund he had claimed and owed more than $400m (£328m) in debt due by 2024.

A representative of Mr Trump's business empire denied the accuracy of the report at the time. Official copies of the former president's tax returns, which are now expected to be released before Republicans take control of Congress on 3 January, should settle the matter.