Former President Trump appears to be sticking to his yearslong stance of declining to make his tax returns available to the public as the 2024 presidential campaign enters its final stretch.
With a little more than two months to go until Election Day, Trump has yet to release his most recent tax returns, while Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, has so far released 20 years’ worth of tax returns.
Trump’s decision during his initial White House run and subsequent presidency not to release tax returns bucked nearly 50 years of precedent established by President Nixon. The only other president not to make his full tax returns public during this period was Gerald Ford, who provided a tax summary.
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump claimed he could not release them because he was under audit. In 2020 an IRS contractor leaked parts of Trump’s tax returns to The New York Times; the returns showed years of sustained losses.
Further scrutiny came in 2022 after he left office, when then-House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard E. Neal, D-Mass., revealed that the IRS failed to execute audits of Trump’s tax returns as required under the agency’s mandatory presidential audit program. Neal released six years of Trump’s tax returns to the public days before Republicans took control of the House.
Questions surrounding Trump’s tax arrangements popped up again in May when an investigation by The New York Times and ProPublica showed that the Republican presidential nominee may owe the IRS more than $100 million because of his use of the worthlessness deduction and not declaring certain forgiven debt as income.
The Trump campaign didn’t respond to Tax Notes' July 22 request for the returns. The Republican National Committee didn’t reply to a request for comment.