One of the salient pieces of information to have emerged from the House Panel investigation that on Tuesday voted to make public six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns is that despite the Internal Revenue’s program that makes the auditing of sitting presidents mandatory, the Service failed to audit Trump’s taxes during his first two years in office.
Trump did file returns in 2017 for the two previous tax years, but the I.R.S. 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. Was the timing of this just a coincidence?
The I.R.S. 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.
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 the former president and several associated businesses from 2015 to 2020 became public as they redacted sensitive details, like street addresses and bank account numbers.
It was not immediately clear why the I.R.S. delayed starting auditing the tax returns Mr. Trump filed as president. After a scandal related to former President Richard M. Nixon’s taxes, the agency under the Carter administration adopted a program that requires the agency to audit such filings every year. Its regulations explicitly state that “individual tax returns for the president and the vice president are subject to mandatory review.”
John A. Koskinen, the former I.R.S. commissioner who served during the first year of Trump’s presidency, said in an interview that he was not involved in the presidential audit process and that he did not know why the audits did not occur.
“It does seem to me to be a legitimate question: If the I.R.S. had the responsibility and wasn’t auditing, what’s the explanation?” he asked.
Starting in 2018, the I.R.S. was run by a Trump appointee, Charles P. Rettig, who left the post last month. In 2016, Mr. Rettig, then a tax lawyer in Beverly Hills, Calif., published a column in Forbes that defended Mr. Trump’s decision not to release his taxes as a candidate.
The I.R.S. did not immediately comment on the matter after the disclosure late Tuesday. But Mr. Neal said that when the committee had inquired, “Rettig said at different points that they were simply outgunned” and that the I.R.S. said it lacked specialists capable of assessing Mr. Trump’s filings.
Mr. Neal had first requested access to Mr. Trump’s tax returns in 2019, after Democrats won control of the House in the midterm elections and began trying to perform oversight of Mr. Trump. But the Trump administration would not let the Treasury Department comply with the request.
