Trump tax returns to be released on Friday

Former US President Donald Trump's tax returns will be released on Friday, a spokesperson for the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee said on Tuesday.

The Democratic-controlled committee obtained the returns last month after the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the committee culminating a yearslong fight between Trump and the Democrats amid a lengthy court battle.

Trump was the first presidential candidate in decades who did not make his tax returns public during either of his campaigns in 2016 and 2020.

Last week, talking about the release of the documents, Representative Richard Neal, the panel chairman, said: "This is about the presidency, not the president."

IRS failed to audit Trump

The former Republican president's partially redacted tax returns from the years 2015 to 2021 are expected to be among the documents to be made public on Friday.

The House committee is under a time crunch as new the newly shaped Congress, with Republicans in control of the House, begins on January 3.

According to a committee report released last week, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) broke its own laws by failing to audit Trump for three of his four years in office.

The tax figures released by a congressional panel last week showed Trump declared a loss from his many business holdings in 2020 and paid no income tax.

Trump reacted to the development on his social media network recently saying: "You can't learn much from tax returns, but it is illegal to release them if they are not yours!"

ss/jsi (Reuters, AP)