What specific items are included in Attachment E of the House Ways and Means Committee’s release of Trump’s 2015–2020 returns?
Executive summary
Attachment E of the House Ways and Means Committee’s public release is the zip file of the tax documents themselves for the years 2015–2020, organized by year and by individual versus business filings, and it contains the actual individual returns, various supporting IRS forms (including Alternative Minimum Tax schedules and passthrough reconciliation reports for at least one year), and corporate/business entity returns that together span thousands of pages [1][2].
1. What Attachment E is and how it’s organized
Attachment E is the repository of the raw tax-return documents the committee published after obtaining Trump’s federal returns; the committee and reporting make clear the attachment is divided into two broad buckets — individual returns and business returns — and then broken out year-by-year for 2015 through 2020 [1][2].
2. Year-by-year inventory: exactly which forms are included
The public listing released with the report shows Attachment E contains, by year, the following primary files: for 2015 — an individual tax return, an Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) form, and a business tax return; for 2016 — an individual return and a business return; for 2017 — an individual return, a passthrough income and AMT reconciliation report, and a business return; for 2018 — an individual return and business return; for 2019 — an individual return and business return; and for 2020 — an individual return and business return [2]. That enumerated list is the committee’s public breakdown of Attachment E’s contents [2].
3. Scale and types of documents inside Attachment E
The package is not just one-page summaries: the returns and supporting materials span nearly 6,000 pages in total, consisting of more than 2,700 pages of individual returns (including for Melania Trump where applicable) and more than 3,000 pages of business-entity returns and schedules, according to contemporaneous reporting based on the committee’s release [2]. The business-side files include corporate and partnership tax returns and related schedules that provide detail on entity-level income, losses, deductions and asset schedules [2][1].
4. Special or standout items called out in the release
Reporters and the committee highlighted a few specific supporting documents in proximity to Attachment E: the package of attachments released by the committee also included a 1977 IRS memo on mandatory presidential audits (Attachment C), briefing materials (Attachment D), and separate audit-related documents redacted for privacy (Attachments F–H) — context that accompanied Attachment E but are not themselves part of the year-by-year tax-return ZIP [2]. Within Attachment E itself, the committee’s public index calls out the 2017 passthrough income and AMT reconciliation report as a distinct item, underscoring that not all supporting schedules are identical across years [2].
5. Redactions, privacy concerns and how the committee handled sensitive material
Before public release the committee said it would redact “sensitive information” such as Social Security numbers and similarly private identifiers; the document release process was described by committee leaders as requiring a short period to remove such information [3][4]. Reporting also notes the committee elected to make the returns public after a vote and with partial redactions, which is why Attachment E as published is not a verbatim, unredacted mirror of the IRS files [3].
6. Where Attachment E came from and disputes over release
The returns in Attachment E were delivered to the committee after a multiyear legal fight in which the committee sought the records under Internal Revenue Code Section 6103(f); the transfer followed litigation culminating in the Supreme Court allowing the handover, and the committee then voted to publish the records as Attachments [5][4]. Critics argued the release raised separation-of-powers and privacy concerns, a point emphasized by Republican committee members at the time [6][4].
Attachment E, therefore, is the committee’s published ZIP of the year-by-year individual and business tax returns (2015–2020) plus certain supporting IRS forms and schedules — explicitly enumerated on the committee’s index as the individual returns, AMT forms in some years, business returns, and the 2017 passthrough/AMT reconciliation — totaling thousands of pages and released with redactions for privacy [2][1][3].