What IRS Audits Were Actually Pending Against Trump? The Complete Breakdown

For a decade, Donald Trump used the phrase “I’m under audit” as a shield against releasing his tax returns. In 2026, he used a legal settlement to permanently close every one of those audits before they could produce a verdict. Here is exactly what was open, what each audit was examining, and why the IRS never finished any of them.

Every Known Trump IRS Audit — At a Glance

Audit	Years Covered	What the IRS Was Examining	Status in 2026	Closed by Settlement?
Casino abandonment refund dispute	2009–ongoing	$72.9M refund claim based on claimed casino losses	Open — unresolved for 15+ years	Yes — permanently
Chicago tower double write-off	2008, 2010–2020	$168M in additional losses claimed via 2010 restructuring; IRS said losses written off twice	Open — escalated to senior IRS review	Yes — permanently
Seven Springs conservation easement	2015	$21.1M charitable deduction for New Jersey estate woodland; IRS flagged for examination	Flagged — no final ruling	Yes — permanently
Mandatory presidential audit — 2016 return	2016	Standard annual presidential audit	Opened 2019; never completed	Yes — permanently
Mandatory presidential audit — 2017 return	2017	Standard annual presidential audit	Not even opened until after Trump left office	Yes — permanently
Mandatory presidential audit — 2018 return	2018	Standard annual presidential audit	Not opened until after Trump left office	Yes — permanently
Mandatory presidential audit — 2019 return	2019	Standard annual presidential audit	Not opened until after Trump left office	Yes — permanently
Mandatory presidential audit — 2020 return	2020	Standard annual presidential audit	Not opened until after Trump left office	Yes — permanently
Foreign tax credits	2018	$1M+ in foreign tax credits flagged by Congress for review	Flagged — no confirmed audit status	Yes — permanently
Loans to children / potential gift tax	2015–2020	Related-party loans of $46K–$51K annually; Congress questioned if these were disguised gifts	Flagged — no confirmed audit status	Yes — permanently
Business expense deductions	2015–2020	Multiple businesses reported expenses equal to income; IRS agents never brought in specialists	Incomplete audit — JCT criticized IRS approach	Yes — permanently

The Claim That Ran for a Decade

On September 26, 2016, Donald Trump stood on a debate stage in Hofstra, New York, and told the American public why he had refused to release his tax returns.

“I’m under audit,” he said. “And I’ve been under audit for many years because the numbers are big, and I think anyone with any brains would understand that.”

It was a line he had used for years, and he would use it for years more. He said it in debates, in press conferences, from helicopter steps, and on Truth Social. The subtext was always the same: the IRS is watching me, and that is why you cannot see the returns.

On May 19, 2026, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed a one-page document barring the IRS from ever examining those same returns again — permanently, forever, across every year they had never finished reviewing.

The journey from “I’m under audit” to “the IRS is forever barred from auditing me” is a ten-year story. To understand it, you need to know exactly what audits actually existed, what each one was about, and what the IRS would have found if any of them had ever been allowed to reach a conclusion.

This is that story.

Audit #1 — The $72.9 Million Casino Refund Dispute

This is the audit Trump was almost certainly referring to every time he said “I’m under audit.” It had been running since approximately 2010 — six years before he ever ran for president.

Here is the background. By 2009, Trump’s Atlantic City casino empire was in total collapse. The casinos had filed for bankruptcy multiple times through the 1990s. By the time the business finally went through a definitive restructuring in 2009, Trump walked away — or appeared to walk away — from his stake in the casino operations.

Under U.S. tax law, a partner who genuinely abandons a business interest with nothing in return can declare all of the accumulated, previously unusable losses from that business on their tax return. This is called an abandonment loss, and it can generate a refund for taxes already paid in prior profitable years.

Trump’s accountants argued he had done exactly that — abandoned the casino business entirely. The losses he claimed, which totaled approximately $700 million for 2008 and 2009, were then used to calculate a tax refund of $72.9 million. That refund covered every dollar of federal income tax Trump had paid during his most profitable years — 2005 through 2008, when The Apprentice was generating significant television income — plus accumulated interest.

The IRS challenged the refund on a specific legal ground: Trump had not actually walked away with nothing. In exchange for continuing to license his name to the new casino operators after the bankruptcy reorganization, he received a 5% equity stake and warrants for an additional 5%. Under tax law, receiving any equity interest — even a small one — in exchange for giving up a business stake means you did not truly abandon the business. If you received something, the abandonment claim fails, and the entire refund must be returned with interest and potential penalties.

The New York Times first reported on this dispute in September 2020, after obtaining Trump’s tax records. The Times and ProPublica calculated that if the IRS prevailed on this argument, Trump would owe back the $72.9 million refund, plus years of interest accrued at IRS rates, plus potential civil fraud penalties — a total estimated liability exceeding $100 million.

The dispute had been running, unresolved, for over a decade when the 2026 settlement closed it permanently.

The detail that sharpens the irony: this refund — if validated — would have meant that Trump paid zero net federal income tax on tens of millions of dollars in television and entertainment income across his most prosperous years. He would have, in effect, been repaid for taxes he had already paid.

To understand the broader strategy behind how this audit got buried alongside the $10 billion lawsuit, read our investigation into how the deal was structured from the start: Trump Sued the IRS for $10 Billion — Now His Own Justice Department May Pay Him Using Taxpayer Money.

Audit #2 — The Chicago Tower Double Write-Off

This was a second, entirely separate IRS dispute — uncovered jointly by ProPublica and the New York Times in 2024 — involving Trump’s 92-story skyscraper in Chicago.

The Trump International Hotel and Tower Chicago opened in 2009, directly into the financial crisis. It was commercially disastrous. Sales lagged far behind projections. Lenders eventually agreed to forgive roughly $270 million in debt Trump could not repay.

In 2008, Trump’s accountants declared his stake in the tower “worthless” under partnership tax law — a move that allowed him to claim losses as high as $651 million for that year alone. This 2008 claim was not challenged by the IRS at the time, which tax experts found surprising given its scale.

Then, in 2010, Trump’s legal team executed a second maneuver. They shifted the tower into a new partnership, “DJT Holdings LLC.” Using this restructured entity as the legal vehicle, Trump’s team then claimed an additional $168 million in losses from the same Chicago project over the following decade — from 2011 through 2020.

The IRS’s position was that Trump had written off the same losses twice. The first write-off in 2008 was the “worthless” claim on his original stake. The second round of write-offs from 2011 through 2020 was based on the same underlying failed investment, now laundered through a new partnership structure. Double-dipping on the same losses is not permitted under tax law.

The dispute escalated significantly during Trump’s first term in office. In 2019, the IRS issued what is called a Technical Advice Memorandum — a rare, formal document reserved for legally complex cases requiring senior-level review — that analyzed Trump’s Chicago tower position. The memo identified Trump only as “A,” standard anonymization practice. Its existence was confirmed by a passing reference in a December 2022 congressional report.

ProPublica and the Times, working with independent tax experts, calculated that if the IRS prevailed on the Chicago tower argument, Trump’s revised tax bill — accounting for the disallowed deductions, plus interest at IRS rates, plus potential penalties — would exceed $100 million. This was entirely separate from the casino refund dispute.

Two known audits. Two separate $100 million+ potential liabilities. Both permanently closed by one page signed in May 2026.

Audit #3 — The Seven Springs Conservation Easement

In 2015, Trump claimed a $21.1 million charitable tax deduction for a conservation easement on his Seven Springs estate in Westchester County, New York. A conservation easement is an arrangement where a property owner donates development rights to a qualified organization, promising not to build on or develop land, in exchange for a tax deduction based on the value of the rights given up.

These deductions are legitimate when the land genuinely has significant development value and that value is honestly appraised. The IRS has spent years, however, cracking down on inflated conservation easements — particularly where appraisers dramatically overstate the value of forgone development rights to manufacture deductions that vastly exceed the land’s real-world worth.

When Congress’s nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation reviewed six years of Trump’s tax returns in December 2022, the $21.1 million Seven Springs deduction was specifically flagged as an item that “warranted examination.” The Committee noted the IRS had already flagged it for auditing. No final determination had been made.

The scale of the IRS’s concern about conservation easements nationally puts this in context. Courts have repeatedly upheld the IRS’s position in similar disputes, in some cases disallowing deductions entirely and imposing 40% gross valuation misstatement penalties on top of the disallowed amount. Promoters of fraudulent conservation easements — in unrelated cases — have received federal prison sentences of 25 years. The IRS has described the most aggressive versions as among “the worst of the worst tax scams.”

Whether Trump’s specific Seven Springs easement would have been disallowed, reduced, or upheld in full was a question that the 2026 settlement made permanently unanswerable.

The Scandal Nobody Covered — The Mandatory Audit That Never Happened

Everything above involves complex, disputed tax positions where reasonable people can disagree about who would have prevailed. This section is different. This is about a straightforward institutional failure that has received almost no coverage in the context of the 2026 settlement — and it is arguably the most damning part of the entire story.

Since 1977, the IRS has had a standing internal policy: the president’s tax returns must be audited every single year, automatically, without exception. This is not a law — it is an IRS internal requirement, codified in the agency’s own Internal Revenue Manual. The reason for it is obvious. The president controls the executive branch. The IRS is part of the executive branch. Without mandatory, automatic audits, there is no mechanism to ensure that the most powerful person in the country is actually paying their taxes.

When the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee obtained six years of Trump’s tax returns in late 2022 and published its findings, it discovered something that Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden called the IRS being “asleep at the wheel.”

Here is what the Committee found, specifically:

For the tax years 2015 and the 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 filing years, the IRS failed to designate Trump’s returns for mandatory audit on time. The only return subjected to mandatory audit during his entire four years as president was his 2016 tax year return. That single audit was never completed before Trump left office in January 2021.

The notification for Trump’s 2015 return was sent to him on April 3, 2019 — coincidentally the exact same date that Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal formally requested Trump’s returns from the IRS. For his 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 returns: no audit was initiated at all while he was president. The examinations were not opened until after he had already left office.

The Committee’s conclusion was direct: “The mandatory audit program was dormant, at best, during the prior Administration.”

The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, reviewing the same records, published a companion report that added another layer of criticism. When audits were conducted on Trump’s business entities, IRS agents in charge of the examinations repeatedly failed to bring in specialists qualified to assess the complexity of Trump’s holdings — hundreds of partnerships, LLCs, and foreign business arrangements. Instead, agents frequently concluded that a limited examination was sufficient because Trump had hired a major accounting firm, reasoning that the accountants would ensure accuracy.

The JCT report was blunt: “We must express disagreement with the decision not to engage any specialists when facing returns with a high degree of complexity. We also fail to understand why the fact that counsel and an accounting firm participated in tax preparation ensures the accuracy of the returns.”

In other words: the IRS performed incomplete, understaffed audits on some of Trump’s most complex filings, and did not audit him at all during the first two years of his presidency.

When Trump told the American public in 2016 and 2017 and 2018 and 2019 that he could not release his returns because he was “under audit” — during significant portions of those years, he was not under mandatory audit at all. The program that should have ensured he was examined annually had simply stopped functioning.

What Congress Specifically Flagged — The Full List

Beyond the named audits and the mandatory program failures, the Joint Committee on Taxation’s December 2022 report flagged a series of additional items across Trump’s 2015–2020 returns that it said “warranted examination.” These represent potential audit triggers that the 2026 settlement also permanently buried.

Related-party loans to his children (2015–2020): 

In each of the six years examined, Trump reported income from loans made to his adult children — Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump — ranging from $46,000 to $51,000 annually. The Committee questioned whether these were genuine arms-length loans carrying market interest rates, or whether they functioned as disguised gifts. If they were gifts, they would trigger gift tax liability rather than interest income treatment. Trump’s children would also be unable to deduct the interest.

Foreign tax credits — 2018: 

Trump claimed over $1 million in foreign tax credits in 2018, used to offset taxes owed on U.S. income. The Committee flagged this for review. Foreign tax credit claims are a known area of aggressive tax planning; improperly claimed credits can result in repayment with penalties.

Business loss carryovers — 2015: 

Trump’s 2015 return included $105 million in loss carryovers from prior years. The Committee raised questions about whether those carryovers were correctly calculated and properly documented across multiple years of returns.

Business expense deductions — multiple years: 

Multiple Trump sole proprietorships reported total expenses nearly identical to gross income across several years — in one case, reporting $680,886 in gross income and $680,886 in expenses, producing zero taxable profit. The Committee said these warranted examination to determine whether expenses were genuine business costs or personal expenses run through business entities. Disguising personal expenses as business deductions is a common form of tax fraud.

Charitable contributions — multiple years:

 Trump claimed charitable contributions ranging from $500,000 to $2 million annually across the examined years, in addition to the $21.1 million conservation easement. The Committee flagged these for examination, noting that many of the contributions did not reduce tax liability in the year claimed — because there was no taxable income to reduce — but that carryover deductions could affect future years.

Every one of these flagged items is now permanently immune from IRS examination.

The Mandatory Audit That Was Never a Law — And Why That Mattered

One detail from this story deserves its own moment of attention, because it explains how the audit failures of 2017 and 2018 were possible.

The IRS’s mandatory presidential audit requirement is not a law passed by Congress. It is an internal IRS policy — a rule the agency set for itself in 1977, following the Watergate-era scandals in which Nixon was found to have improperly paid his taxes while president. Congress never codified it as a statutory requirement.

That distinction matters enormously. A law requires compliance and creates legal liability for failure to comply. An internal policy can be ignored, de-prioritized, or simply allowed to go dormant — as the Ways and Means Committee found it had been during Trump’s first term.

After the December 2022 findings, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal formally proposed legislation to change this — to make the mandatory presidential audit a statutory requirement enshrined in law, with public disclosure of audit status and findings. The proposal went nowhere in the Republican-controlled House that took power in January 2023.

As of May 2026, presidential audits remain a policy, not a law. The 2026 settlement closed all pending and incomplete audits permanently. And the legislative gap that made the 2017–2020 audit failures possible remains unfilled.

The 2026 Settlement — What It Closed and What It Left Open

When acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed the one-page addendum on May 19, 2026, the document used sweeping language that goes beyond just the audits we know about.

The IRS is “FOREVER BARRED AND PRECLUDED” from pursuing any claims, examinations, or inquiries into Trump’s tax returns filed before May 18, 2026 — including matters “currently pending or that could be pending.”

That phrase — “that could be pending” — is significant. It does not just close the audits that were open. It closes audits that had not yet been opened but might have been opened in the future, based on issues in prior-year returns. The conservation easement. The related-party loans. The foreign tax credits. The business expense matching. All of it — closed, whether or not the IRS had formally opened an examination.

The Department of Justice clarified after the fact that the settlement covers only existing audits, not future returns filed after May 18, 2026. Trump and his family are still required to file and pay taxes on income earned going forward. But the language of the document and the DOJ’s own statement reflect the full scope of what was extinguished: every unresolved question about every year of Trump’s tax history up to that point.

Brandon DeBot, the policy director of the Tax Law Center at NYU School of Law, called the arrangement a “breathtaking abuse of the tax and legal system,” and said the Justice Department does not have the legal authority to offer the broad protections promised in the addendum. That legal challenge — whether the DOJ even had the power to sign such a document — remains unresolved.

The moment the settlement was announced, we covered the full story of how it was reached and what it contained: Trump Drops $10B IRS Lawsuit As $1.8B Allies Fund Takes Shape.

And to understand the $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund that was created as the public-facing part of the same deal — who controls it, who gets paid from it, and whether January 6 defendants can apply — see: Trump’s $1.7B IRS Deal Explained: What It Means For Taxpayers.

The pattern of the DOJ being used as a legal tool to protect the administration’s own political and financial interests runs through multiple stories in this period — including the department’s decision to sue the D.C. Bar to block sanctions against Trump-era attorneys: DOJ Sues D.C. Bar Over Trump Lawyers Sanctions.

Was Trump Ever “Under Audit” When He Said He Was?

This is the question that ties the decade-long narrative together.

The short, honest answer is: sometimes yes, sometimes no, and never completely.

When Trump first ran for president in 2015 and 2016 and said he was “under audit” as his reason for not releasing returns, the casino refund dispute had been running since approximately 2010. That was a genuine, active IRS audit involving a disputed $72.9 million refund. So there was truth to the claim — but the claim was not the whole truth. There were no laws barring him from releasing his returns under audit; every prior president and major-party candidate since Nixon had done so. The audit was a reason to be cautious, not a legal barrier.

When Trump was president in 2017 and 2018 and continued to claim he was “under audit,” the picture was different. The casino refund dispute was still technically open — but as the Ways and Means Committee found, the mandatory annual presidential audits that should have been running were not running at all. The IRS’s mandatory examination program had gone dormant. Trump was simultaneously claiming to be under audit as justification for secrecy while the agency responsible for auditing him had, in effect, stopped.

When his 2018 presidential return was finally sent for examination — after he had already left office in 2021 — it joined a backlog of presidential returns that had never been completed during his tenure.

And then in May 2026, the entire backlog — every open examination, every flagged item, every mandatory presidential audit that had been opened late and never finished — was closed permanently by a document his former personal lawyer signed as the nation’s acting attorney general.

The ten-year shield became a permanent one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was Trump actually under IRS audit? 

Yes, at least partially. The most significant confirmed audit — a dispute over a $72.9 million tax refund from his casino businesses — had been running since approximately 2010. However, the mandatory annual presidential audits that should have examined every year of his presidency were largely not conducted on time. For his 2017 and 2018 presidential returns, no mandatory audit was opened until after he had already left office in 2021.

What was Trump’s main IRS dispute?

 The longest-running and most significant known dispute involved a $72.9 million refund Trump claimed in 2010, based on losses from his bankrupt Atlantic City casino businesses. The IRS challenged the refund on the grounds that Trump may not have truly abandoned the casino business — he received a 5% equity stake in exchange for licensing his name to the new casino operators. If the IRS prevailed, Trump would have owed back the $72.9 million plus over a decade of accumulated interest and penalties, totaling an estimated $100 million or more.

What was the Chicago tower audit? 

A separate IRS inquiry into Trump’s treatment of losses from his Chicago skyscraper. In 2008, Trump claimed his stake in the tower was “worthless,” generating enormous losses. Then in 2010, through a corporate restructuring, he claimed an additional $168 million in losses from the same project over the following decade. The IRS argued he had effectively written off the same losses twice, which is not permitted. Experts estimated this dispute could have cost Trump more than $100 million if the IRS had prevailed.

Why didn’t the IRS audit Trump during his first two years as president?

 The House Ways and Means Committee found in December 2022 that the IRS’s mandatory presidential audit program had gone “dormant, at best” during Trump’s first term. For the 2017 and 2018 tax years, no mandatory audit was initiated while Trump was in office. The only mandatory audit opened during his presidency — for his 2016 return — was started in April 2019, the same day Congress formally requested his returns, and was never completed before he left office.

What did Congress find when it reviewed Trump’s tax returns?

 The Joint Committee on Taxation’s December 2022 report flagged multiple issues including: a $21.1 million conservation easement deduction, over $1 million in foreign tax credits, $105 million in carryover losses, related-party loans to his children that could have been taxable gifts, and multiple businesses reporting expenses matching income exactly. IRS agents were also criticized for not using specialists when auditing Trump’s complex multi-entity returns.

Are all of Trump’s IRS audits now closed permanently? 

Yes — for all tax returns filed before May 18, 2026. The one-page addendum signed by acting AG Todd Blanche on May 19, 2026 permanently bars the IRS from pursuing any examination of Trump, his family, his businesses, his trusts, or his affiliates for any returns filed before the settlement date. The DOJ has clarified that future returns — filed after May 18, 2026 — are not covered and can still be audited.

Could a future administration reopen Trump’s audits?

 Possibly — but it would require both a political willingness to challenge the settlement document and a court willing to rule that the DOJ exceeded its authority in issuing it. Legal experts are divided on whether the document is legally enforceable. Brandon DeBot of NYU’s Tax Law Center called it a “breathtaking abuse of the tax and legal system” and said the DOJ may not have had the legal authority to offer such broad protections.

Published: May 20, 2026 | Reading time: ~17 minutes | Category: Legal News, Tax Law, Politics

Related Reading:

• He Sued Himself and Won: How Trump Got Lifetime Tax Immunity for His Entire Family
• How Much Money Did the Trump Family Actually Save From the IRS Settlement?
• Trump Drops $10B IRS Lawsuit As $1.8B Allies Fund Takes Shape
• Trump’s $1.7B IRS Deal Explained: What It Means For Taxpayers
• DOJ Sues D.C. Bar Over Trump Lawyers Sanctions

Prepared by the All About Lawyer Editorial Team
Reviewed for factual accuracy against publicly available congressional reports, IRS audit records, court filings, Joint Committee on Taxation materials, investigative reporting by major news organizations, and official Department of Justice statements available as of May 20, 2026. Last Updated: May 20, 2026.

Disclaimer:
This article is provided for informational and journalistic purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice. Allegations, audit findings, legal interpretations, and government actions discussed in this report are based on publicly available records, investigative reporting, and official statements at the time of publication. Certain matters described remain disputed, unresolved, or subject to differing legal interpretations. Readers should consult a qualified attorney, CPA, or licensed tax professional for advice regarding any specific legal or tax matter.