IRS let Trump avoid tax audits while in office

The Internal Revenue Service failed to audit former President Donald Trump’s tax filings during his first two years in office despite a program that makes the auditing of sitting presidents mandatory, a House committee revealed on Tuesday after an extraordinary vote to make public six years of his tax returns.

Trump filed returns in 2017 for the two previous tax years, but the IRS began auditing those filings only in 2019 — the first on the same day in April the Ways and Means Committee requested access to his taxes and any associated audits, a report by the panel said. The IRS has yet to complete those audits, it said, and the agency started auditing his filings covering his income while president only after he left office.

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The revelation could transform the political context of the committee’s nearly four-year fight to obtain information about Trump’s taxes and any related audits. Its chair, Rep. Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, had said the panel needed the data to assess the IRS’ mandatory presidential audit program, but Trump’s lawyers and Republicans called that a pretext for a politically motivated fishing expedition.

The suggestion of dysfunction in the auditing program was an early takeaway in what could be a series of disclosures related to the release of Trump’s returns. Democrats said it might be several days before thousands of pages of tax filings from Trump and several associated businesses from 2015 to 2020 became public as they redacted sensitive details, like street addresses and bank account numbers.

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The party-line vote to release the materials came during the last weeks of Democratic control of the House after Republican gains in the midterm election. The committee invoked a century-old statute that allows it to lawfully make public otherwise confidential tax information involving Trump, who had defied tradition by refusing to disclose his financial information as a presidential candidate and sitting president.

The committee debated behind closed doors for more than four hours before voting to make public Trump’s returns.

After a scandal related to former President Richard M Nixon’s taxes, the IRS under the Carter administration adopted a program that requires the agency to audit such filings every year.

Its regulations state that “individual tax returns for the president and the vice president are subject to mandatory review.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.