A Democratic-controlled committee voted on Tuesday to release tax filings of the former president who broke political norms by refusing to release the information on his own.
The committee also found that required IRS audits of Donald Trump were delayed.
The full level of detail that will be revealed is uncertain, but the politicians said they expect to release six years of tax returns for Mr Trump and eight affiliated companies.
Some sensitive personal information would be redacted. While the 29-page report summarising the committee’s work was issued later on Tuesday night, the tax returns themselves may not be released for several more days.
The report indicates that the Trump administration may have disregarded an IRS requirement dating back to 1977 that mandates audits of a president’s tax filings.
The IRS only began to audit his 2015 tax filings on April 3, 2019, a date more than two years into Mr Trump’s presidency.
It was not until September 2019 that the IRS began to audit Mr Trump’s 2016 tax filings. Audits were on a lag for his 2017, 2018 and 2019 filings and never even began for his 2020 submission.
A separate report released by the Joint Committee on Taxation, detailing Mr Trump’s reported income and taxes owed, suggested he paid a relatively modest share of his income to the federal government.
The release is the culmination of a years-long fight between Mr Trump and Democrats that has played out everywhere from the campaign trail to the halls of Congress and the Supreme Court.
Democrats on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee argued that transparency and the rule of law were at stake by voting to issue a report that legally rests on questions about how the IRS monitors US presidents.
Republicans countered that the release would set a dangerous precedent with regard to the loss of privacy protections.
“This is about the presidency, not the president,” committee chairman Richard Neal told reporters.
Texas representative Kevin Brady, the panel’s top GOP member, said “Regrettably, the deed is done”.
“Over our objections in opposition, Democrats in the Ways and Means Committee have unleashed a dangerous new political weapon that overturns decades of privacy protections,” he told reporters.
“The era of political targeting, and of Congress’s enemies list, is back and every American, every American taxpayer, who may get on the wrong side of the majority in Congress is now at risk.”
The report raised multiple red flags about aspects of Mr Trump’s tax filings, including his carryover losses, deductions tied to conservation and charitable donations, and loans to his children that could be taxable gifts.
Mr Trump has long had a complicated relationship with his personal income taxes.
As a presidential candidate in 2016, he broke decades of precedent by refusing to release his tax forms to the public.
He bragged during a presidential debate that year that he was “smart” because he paid no federal taxes and later claimed he would not personally benefit from the 2017 tax cuts he signed into law that favoured people with extreme wealth, asking Americans to simply take him at his word.
Tax records would have been a useful metric for judging his success in business.
The image of a savvy businessman was key to a political brand honed during his years as a tabloid magnet and star of The Apprentice TV show.
They also could reveal any financial obligations — including foreign debts — that could influence how he governed.
But Americans were largely in the dark about Mr Trump’s relationship with the IRS until October 2018 and September 2020, when The New York Times published two separate series based on leaked tax records.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 articles showed how Mr Trump received a modern equivalent of at least 413 million dollars (£339m) from his father’s real estate holdings, with much of that money coming from what the Times called “tax dodges” in the 1990s.
Mr Trump sued the Times and his niece, Mary Trump, in 2021 for providing the records to the newspaper.
In November, Mary Trump asked an appeals court to overturn a judge’s decision to reject her claims that her uncle and two of his siblings defrauded her of millions of dollars in a 2001 family settlement.
The 2020 articles showed that Mr Trump paid just 750 dollars (£616) in federal income taxes in 2017 and 2018. Mr Trump paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the past 15 years because he generally lost more money than he made.
The articles exposed deep inequities in the US tax code as Mr Trump, a reputed multi-billionaire, paid little in federal income taxes.
IRS figures indicate that the average tax filer paid roughly 12,200 dollars (£10,000) in 2017, about 16 times more than the former president paid.
Details about Mr Trump’s income from foreign operations and debt levels were also contained in the tax filings, which the former president derided as “fake news”.
At the time of the 2020 articles, Mr Neal said he saw an ethical problem in Mr Trump overseeing a federal agency that he has also battled with legal filings.
“Now, Donald Trump is the boss of the agency he considers an adversary,” Mr Neal said in 2020. “It is essential that the IRS’s presidential audit programme remain free of interference.”
