How does publication advance the otherwise valuable findings of the committee? Couldn’t the committee highlight the IRS’ failures in a report and keep Trump’s returns private? I believe so. For instance, the committee could not know how difficult it might be for the IRS to audit Trump’s returns if it did not know how complex they were, in the first place.īut publication of his returns is different. And that strikes me as a sufficient reason to obtain and examine Trump’s returns. The committee report recommends ways to fix the structural failures at the IRS, going forward. Perhaps, and this is surmise, it was something more nefarious. Perhaps, relatedly, it failed because the IRS did not have sufficient resources to audit a complex return. Perhaps the IRS failed because Trump’s returns were inordinately complex. Why did the IRS fail to abide its own - nearly half-century old - policy? This was one of the major questions raised in the committee’s report. Oddly, the committee also noted that “the IRS sent a letter to notifying him that his … 2015 return was selected for examination on April 3, 2019, which is the date the sent the initial request to the IRS for … tax returns.” That does not seem to be a coincidence. But the committee found that three of the five returns - for calendar years 2017, 2018, and 2019 - “were not selected for examination until after left office and only the 2016 tax return was subject to a mandatory examination.” The committee learned that during Trump’s term in office, he filed five personal income tax returns with the IRS, all of which should have been subject to the mandatory audit program. To insulate the audit and the auditors from politics, the IRS manual transformed the “should” question into a “must” requirement: Since 1977, it provides that the “ndividual income tax returns for the President and Vice President are subject to mandatory examinations.” That could be tricky, because the IRS is part of the executive branch, which is led by a president. Wisely, it took the onus off individual IRS employees to determine whether they “should” audit a president’s returns. So, the committee’s focus was properly the IRS’ mandatory audit program. Ought the return information and tax returns of the former President to investigate how the IRS’s mandatory audit program operated under the stress of a President who maintained financial interests in hundreds of related entities and reportedly was under audit every single year. He turned out to be right about that, at least the first time around. Trump took a chance that his voters would neither care nor punish him for ignoring this tradition. The fact that previous candidates and presidents have released their personal returns seemed not to matter to him. His excuse was a lie.īreaking with significant norms of American politics was - and is - routine for Trump. There is absolutely no law, rule or policy that precluded Trump from releasing his own tax returns, whether or not they were under audit. His excuse for withholding his personal tax returns from public scrutiny - that he could not release them because they were under audit - is patently false. Trump could have released those returns when he was first a candidate, or as president, or when he recently announced his third candidacy. The House Ways and Means Committee just released to the public six years of personal tax returns for former President Donald Trump. Chuck Rosenberg is a former United States Attorney and senior FBI official.
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