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The IRS Really, Really Should Have Audited Trump

The failure to do so is outrageous and needs to be investigated.

By Noah Bookbinder
December 30, 2022, 9:11 AM ET

Six years after Donald Trump should have disclosed his tax returns to the public, they have finally been released. This took advocacy, congressional action, and litigation that went to the Supreme Court—all to obtain basic financial transparency from a president.

But the House Ways and Means Committee’s report on its investigation, released last week in conjunction with the committee’s vote to disclose Trump’s tax returns, revealed new information that may be as astonishing as anything in the returns themselves: The IRS did not even begin auditing Trump’s taxes until 2019, on the same day the committee began asking the agency about them. This is outrageous, and it must be investigated.

Getting Trump’s tax returns should not have been this hard. Every president elected since Richard Nixon—with the exception of Trump—has publicly disclosed his tax returns. Tax returns can tell the American people, and Congress, whether a president is following the law and behaving honestly. Crucially for Trump, who uniquely and inappropriately retained ownership of a massive international business while president, they can provide information about conflicts of interest that may have swayed his decision making.

David Frum: Trump’s reckoning with the rule of law
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/donald-trump-company-tax-evasion-fraud/672383/

Examining Trump’s tax returns and discovering all they can reveal about how his finances may have intersected with his presidency will take time. The committee released an analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation stating that Trump had paid nothing, or close to it, in some years of his presidency. The income information included in that analysis also seems to support the assertion that Trump’s use of the presidency to steer business to himself from the government and those seeking to influence it may have reversed years of financial losses for Trump’s companies and led to hefty profits in 2018 and 2019, until COVID’s arrival in 2020 reversed his fortunes again. Now that the detailed returns are available, we’ll learn much more about those companies’ earnings, losses, and tax payments, and about Trump’s financial interests.

But the revelation about the IRS’s failure to perform the required audit of Trump’s taxes—that it did not happen at all for more than two years, and that, according to the committee, his 2017, 2018, and 2019 tax returns were not even selected for audit until after he left office—deserves yet more scrutiny. The IRS’s own regulations mandate that a president’s taxes must be audited every year. Not only that, but ongoing audits were the purported reason Trump gave for refusing to disclose his tax returns. Spokespeople for President Barack Obama confirmed that his taxes were subject to routine annual audits during his presidency, and a spokesperson for President Joe Biden said that his have been too. The Ways and Means Committee reported that, despite Trump’s complex finances, when review finally began in 2019, the audit was initially assigned to a single employee, and no audits of the years requested by the committee—2015 to 2020—have yet been completed.

The requirement to audit the president could not have simply evaded notice at the IRS. Trump’s taxes have been a major public issue since he initially refused to disclose them as a candidate in 2016. The IRS is drastically under-resourced, but insufficient resources are unlikely to be to blame, because they didn’t stop the agency from promptly reviewing the tax returns of the president immediately preceding Trump and the one immediately following him. That a unique resource crunch happened to coincide only with Trump’s presidency strains credulity.

So what happened here? It’s possible that the IRS was aware of all the controversy around Trump’s taxes and simply didn’t want any part of it. That’s inexcusable, but it’s not nefarious.

A more troubling explanation is possible—even likely: that Trump used the levers of government to shield himself from scrutiny.

There’s certainly no reason to think that he had qualms about abusing his power for his own benefit. Throughout his presidency, Trump manipulated and misused component after component of the federal government to protect himself and advance his personal and political interests.

David A. Graham: Trump has nothing else up his sleeve
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/trumps-tax-returns-show-he-has-no-more-tricks/616515/

He and his compliant attorney general Bill Barr misused the Justice Department to undercut investigations of Trump, target perceived enemies, and assist the president’s allies, including by dropping cases, opposing the sentencing recommendations of career prosecutors, and issuing pardons. The Department of the Interior produced videos lauding Trump and arranged for national-park land to be used for his political events. Trump fired or sidelined inspectors general whose investigations harmed him, and he sought to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Senior employees throughout the executive branch routinely praised Trump and attacked his political opponents in violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits most government employees from using their position for politics; Trump ensured that the illegal practice was encouraged rather than punished. And, of course, Trump ultimately tried to use the Justice Department and other parts of government to keep himself in power after losing an election.

Was the IRS’s failure to audit Trump as required by law another instance of the former president’s misuse of the government to protect himself? It is already known that Trump frequently discussed arranging IRS audits of perceived enemies and that two of those enemies, former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, received highly unusual audits; an inspector-general investigation was unable to determine how that happened.

It is also known that Trump installed loyalists at the IRS. In 2018, he appointed Commissioner Charles Rettig, who had previously defended Trump’s refusal to disclose his tax returns and who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars from renting out units in a Trump-branded property. In 2019, Trump prioritized a longtime associate’s confirmation as the agency’s general counsel. These or other loyalists may have acted to protect Trump out of devotion to him, as so many others throughout the government did. IRS employees may also have acted out of fear, shirking their responsibilities to avoid Trump’s wrath.

The Senate Finance Committee must investigate the IRS’s failure. Its chair, Ron Wyden, has already expressed interest in doing so. The agency’s inspector general should investigate too. The public needs to know whether one more key government function was politicized, allowing a president to shield possible conflicts of interest and escape accountability. The American people need reassurances that transparency, oversight, and accountability will once again become matters of course rather than subjects of prolonged litigation.

Donald Trump attempted to hijack the United States government to keep himself in power, and American democracy almost didn’t survive. His tax returns may have been another part of that effort.
That merits investigation—not over another six years, but now.

Noah Bookbinder is the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/trump-tax-returns-released-house-committee-irs-audit/672582/