The House Ways and Means Committee plans to release former President Donald Trump’s tax returns on Friday morning, according to CNN.
Trump’s tax returns will be entered into the congressional record during a special House pro forma session that will happen at 9 a.m. on Friday.
The panel will also make a formal announcement at around the same time.
The release of the former president’s returns is taking place after the panel alleged last week that the IRS failed to audit Trump’s taxes in a timely manner while he was in the White House.
“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.”
The committee voted last Tuesday to release Trump’s tax information to the public, capping a three-year legal saga initiated by Democrats to obtain and release his closely held financial documents, Bloomberg reported.
The action by the Ways and Means Committee — over the objections of the panel’s Republicans — comes in the waning days of the House Democratic majority and one day after Trump was referred for criminal prosecution by the House panel investigating the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots.
The panel, which has an eight-seat Democratic majority, agreed on a party-line vote to release information from Trump’s personal and business tax returns from 2015 to 2020.
Democrats first requested the documents in 2019 to help aid an investigation into the annual audit of presidents. After a lengthy court battle, the Ways and Means Committee obtained the financial filings late last month.
The IRS audit program was essential to the case made by Democrats on the committee which they used to initially gain access to Trump’s tax documents.