Former President Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump paid zero dollars in taxes in 2020 and reported a negative income four times between 2015 and 2020, the House Ways and Means Committee revealed in a report released Wednesday.
Between 2015 and 2017, the document noted that the Trumps reported on their returns a liability of only $750 or less.
The committee, which is controlled by the Democrats, voted Tuesday evening along party lines 24-16 to release Trump’s tax returns, earning backlash from Republicans who slammed the move as a politically motivated invasion of privacy. The Democrats on the panel had been waging a legal fight to do release Trump's returns since 2016.
The panel is expected to release Trump’s full tax returns some time this week, according to the New York Post.
The report documented a six-year period in which it noted that the Trump’s adjusted gross income was listed as negative $53.2 million, with their total federal tax liability listed as $4.4 million.
The former president and his wife reported positive adjusted net income in only two of six years, $24.3 million in 2018 and $4.4 million in 2019, according to the committee.
The 29-page report detailed the Trumps' $1 million tax bill in 2018 and slightly over $133,000 in 2019. In 2020, the Trumps paid $0 in federal taxes after reporting a net loss of $4.8 million.
The report also accused the IRS of not appropriately conducting the mandatory presidential audits of Trump’s returns while he was in office.
“The Committee expected that these mandatory audits were being conducted promptly and in accordance with IRS policies,” Committee chair Richard Neal (D-MA) said in a statement. “We anticipated the IRS would expand the mandatory audit program to account for the complex nature of the former president’s financial situation yet found no evidence of that. This is a major failure of the IRS under the prior administration, and certainly not what we had hoped to find.”
“But the evidence is clear, Congress must step in,” he added.