Former President of The United States Donald Trump and his wife Melania reported negative income in four of the six years between 2015 and 2020 as per the tax returns.
Donald Trump reported negative income
In three of those years — 2015, 2016 and 2017 –the Trumps reported income tax liability of just $750, a report from the House Ways and Means Committee revealed.
The Democrat-controlled panel voted 24-16 along party lines Tuesday evening to release the Trumps’ tax returns following a legal battle that began in 2016.
It has been noted that the full release of the returns is expected in the coming days after all personal information is redacted from them.
In the six-year period covered by the returns, the Trumps’ adjusted gross income totaled negative $53.2 million, and their total federal tax liability, including self-employment and household employment taxes, was $4.4 million.
The Trumps reported positive adjusted gross income in only two of those six years — $24.3 million in 2018 and $4.4 million in 2019. In those years, the then-first couple’s tax bill increased, the report found, with the Trumps paying almost $1 million in taxes in 2018 and $133,445 in 2019.
In 2020 the pandemic raged across the country and the Trumps reported a loss of $4.8 million and paid $0 in federal taxes. The release of the returns follows a protracted legal fight that began in April 2019 and went all the way to the Supreme Court. The panel’s 29-page executive summary also indicates that the IRS failed to conduct a mandatory audit of Donald Trump’s tax returns during the 45th president’s first two years in office. This avoided a requirement that dates back to 1977 following a controversy over former President Richard Nixon’s taxes.
The IRS only began examining the former president’s individual tax return for 2015 — the year he announced his candidacy — on April 3, 2019, the same day committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) sent a letter to the federal agency seeking information about the returns.
