http://fortune.com/2016/08/05/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-donald-trumps-tax-returns/he GOP candidate says his returns are “all very beautiful,” but won’t show them to voters.
Donald Trump has announced that he will not release his tax returns before the presidential election. That controversial decision has elicited a challenge from fellow billionaire and Hillary Clinton supporter Warren Buffett, who’s offered to hold a joint-forum in which the Oracle of Omaha and the developer-candidate both field questions on their filings from an audience of voters.
Given all the mystery and conflicting claims surrounding Trump’s reluctance to comply with what’s standard practice for presidential candidates, it’s instructive to review the main features of the Trump tax controversy. Here are the big questions and Fortune’s answers, largely drawn from our coverage of Trump’s finances over the past several months.
Is It Unusual for a Presidential Candidate to Not Release Personal Tax Returns?
Absolutely. Every major party candidate since Richard Nixon in 1972 has made their returns public before election day. Only one truly competitive candidate refused, and that was billionaire Ross Perot, who won 19% of the vote as an independent in 1992. In most cases, candidates make their filings public around tax time in April, before their conventions and several months prior to the election. The only Republican or Democratic candidate to release after the convention was Mitt Romney in 2012. The delay allowed opponents to wrongly claim that Romney paid no taxes, and the candidate paid dearly for the delay. Trump recently stated that Romney suffered even more by releasing them, and “might have lost the election” because of the way Democrats distorted the details they disclosed.
“If you remember Harry Reid lied about it, he told a dirty lie,” Trump said on Fox News last month. “And Mitt gave that and after he gave it, they found a little sentence and they made such a big deal. He might have lost the election over that.”
So far, Trump’s supporters seem unfazed by his refusal to follow longstanding tradition, but Hillary Clinton is exploiting the issue, claiming that Trump may be concealing that he donates nothing to charity and may be concealing questionable financial dealings.
What’s Trump’s Reason for Refusing to Follow Longstanding Practice?
Ever since the Republican debates, Trump has stated that several years of his returns are under an IRS audit, and that he won’t release them until the audit is completed. In late July, his campaign said definitively that Trump will not make his filings public before the election, once again citing the audit, which the Trump campaign expects to extend beyond November 8. Trump, however, also pledged to make his returns public if he’s elected president, following the conclusion of the audit.
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