The Democrat-led US House Ways and Means Committee voted on Tuesday to make a redacted version of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns available to the public. Documents covering six years of his financial affairs will be released within days.
The committee also published a report detailing its investigation of the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Mandatory Audit program and its enforcement under the Trump administration. Democratic chairman Richard Neal described it as “dormant” at the time.
“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,” he said, calling the oversight “a major failure” on the part of the US tax service.
The tax records, spanning from 2015 to 2020, were provided to the committee by the IRS last month after a court battle against the former president. Trump broke decades of political tradition by refusing to release them voluntarily both as a candidate and sitting head of state.
Several Democratic committee members insisted that their decision was about the institution of the presidency rather than Trump personally. But Dwight Evans, a representative for Pennsylvania, compared his committee’s work with that of the House select committee on the Capitol riot. On Monday, it recommended that Trump be charged with crimes related to the events of January 6, 2021.
Kevin Brady, the ranking Republican member on the Ways and Means Committee, warned ahead of the vote that “Democrats are unleashing a dangerous new political weapon” with ramifications going far beyond Trump. After the vote, he said that the outcome has nothing to do with the stated purpose of reviewing the IRS presidential audit process.