Donald Trump’s tax returns released by the US Congress. Key takeaways | World News

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Democrats in Congress released thousands of pages of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns on Friday, providing the most detailed picture to date of his finances in six years, including his time in the White House, when he fought to keep the information private in a break with decades of precedent.

The documents include individual returns from Trump and his wife, Melania, along with Trump’s business entities from 2015-2020. They show how Trump used the tax code to lower his tax liability and reveal details about foreign accounts, charitable contributions and the performance of some of his highest-profile business ventures, more which remains protected from public scrutiny.

The disclosure marks the end of a yearlong legal battle that has raged everywhere from the presidential campaign to Congress and the Supreme Court as Trump continues to rebuff efforts to share details about his history with financially opposed to the practice of transparency followed by all his predecessors in the post-Watergate era. The release of the records comes just days before Republicans regain control of the House and weeks after Trump began another campaign for the White House.

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The records show how Trump limited his tax liability by offsetting his income against corporate losses as well as millions of dollars in business expenses, asset write-offs and other deductions.

While Trump paid $641,931 in federal income taxes in 2015, the year he began his campaign for president, he paid just $750 in 2016 and 2017, according to a report released last week by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation by Congress. He paid nearly $1 million in 2018, but only $133,445 in 2019 and nothing in 2020, the year he unsuccessfully sought re-election.

The records also detail Trump’s foreign holdings.

Trump, according to the filings, reported having bank accounts in China, Ireland and the United Kingdom from 2015 to 2017, even though he was commander in chief. As of 2018, however, he only reported one account in the UK Returns also show Trump claimed foreign tax credits for taxes he paid on various business ventures around the world, including licensing arrangements for the use of his name on development projects and his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland. In 2018, according to Joint Committee on Taxation figures, Trump paid more in foreign taxes than his net federal income taxes.

The documents show that Trump’s charitable donations fluctuated during his presidency but, in his later years, represented only a fraction of his income. In 2020, the year the coronavirus devastated the economy, Trump reported zero charitable donations. In 2019 and 2018 he reported writing checks for about $500,000 in donations. In previous years, the numbers were higher — $1.8 million in 2017 and $1.1 million in 2016.

It is unclear whether the reported amounts include Trumps $400,000 annual presidential salary, which he has said he will give up and said he has donated to various federal departments.

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The release marks the latest setback for Trump, who has been mired in investigations, including federal and state inquiries into his efforts to subvert the 2020 election. The Justice Department is also investigating classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago club and possible efforts to obstruct the investigation.

In a statement on Friday, Trump criticized Democrats and the Supreme Court for the release.

“This will lead to terrible things for so many people, he said. Radical, leftist Democrats have weaponized everything, but remember, that’s a dangerous two-way street!

He said the returns showed how successful I was and how I was able to use depreciation and various tax deductions” to build his businesses.

Presiding over a regular pro forma session of the House on Friday, Rep. Don Beyer, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, has taken great care to ensure that returns are treated with sensitivity, with personal and other identifying information.

“We’re trying to be very careful to make sure we’re not using IRS returns,” said Beyer, D-Va. He is also a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, which held a party-line vote last week to make the returns public.

The returns detail how Trump used the tax law to reduce his liability, including carrying large losses from previous years, as tax law allows. Trump said during his 2016 campaign that paying little or no income tax in some years makes me smart.

His tax returns show he did that by building his company into a massive sole proprietorship, with nearly every dollar, pound, euro and yuan flowing through his golf courses, hotels and other assets. affects and in many cases helps his own bottom line.

For example, in 2020, more than 150 of the Trumps’ business entities listed negative qualified business income, which the IRS defines as the net amount of qualified items of income, gain, deductions and losses from any qualified trade or business. The total for that tax year, combined with nearly $9 million in carry forward losses from previous years, brought Trump’s qualified losses to more than $58 million for the final year of his term in office.

Another of Trump’s money losers: the ice rink his company operated until last year in New York City’s Central Park. Trump reported a total of $2.6 million in losses from Wollman Rink over a six-year period that was made public. The rink, an early Trump Organization gem operated through a contract with New York City government, reported a loss of $1.3 million in 2015 despite taking in $9.3 million in revenue, according to tax returns. The rink turned a $298,000 profit in 2016, but returned to melting cash in each of the next four years.

Aspects of Trump’s finances have been shrouded in mystery since his days as an up-and-coming Manhattan real estate developer in the 1980s.

Trump, known for building skyscrapers and hosting a reality TV show before winning the White House, provided limited details about his holdings and income in the mandatory disclosure forms and financial statements he provides. in banks to get loans and in financial magazines to justify his position in the ranking of the world’s billionaires.

Trump’s longtime accounting firm denied the claims, and New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit alleging Trump and his Trump Organization fraudulently inflated asset values ​​in the claims. Trump and his company have denied wrongdoing.

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In October 2018, The New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series based on leaked tax records that contradicted the image Trump tried to sell himself as a self-made businessman. It showed that Trump received the modern-day equivalent of at least $413 million from his father’s estates, with most of the money coming from what the Times called tax dodges in the 1990s.

The second series in 2020 showed that Trump paid no income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years because he generally lost more money than he earned.

In its report last week, the Ways and Means Committee indicated that the Trump administration may have ignored a requirement that mandates audits of presidents’ tax filings.

The IRS only began auditing Trumps 2016 tax filings on April 3, 2019 more than two years into his presidency when the chairman of Ways and Means, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., asked the agency for information related to tax returns.

Every presidential and major party candidate since Richard Nixon has voluntarily made at least summaries of their tax information publicly available. Trump bucked that trend as a candidate and as president, repeatedly insisting that his taxes were under audit and could not be released.

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