The IRS ‘was asleep at the wheel’ when it came to handling the former president donald trumpSenate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore, said Wednesday.
“The presidential audit program is broken”, Wyden said in a press release pledging to work to pass legislation to reform this decades-old program.
His assessment came after the House Ways and Means Committee reported that the IRS had only started one mandatory audit of Trump’s personal tax returns during his four years in the White House — even though agency rules required annual audits of the president’s tax returns.
This only mandatory audit of Trump’s 2016 tax return was not completed during his tenure, according to the House panel’s investigation, which concluded the presidential audit program was ‘dormant, at best’ , under the Trump administration.
“There is no justification for the failure to conduct the required presidential audits until a congressional investigation has been made,” Wyden’s statement said.
“I have additional questions about the extent to which resource issues or fear of political retaliation from the White House contributed to the failures here,” the senator added.
The IRS did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Wyden’s statement.
The Ways and Means Committee report on the presidential audit program was released after the panel’s Democratic majority voted to post redacted copies Trump’s federal tax returns. The vote followed a years-long legal battle with Trump, who had fought to keep his tax information out of the hands of the committee.
Trump broke decades of election precedent by refusing to publicly release his tax returns, both when he was running for president in 2016 and after winning that election. At the time, Trump claimed he was barred from releasing the statements due to an ongoing IRS audit, although fact-checkers reported that he could still free them.
The Supreme Court last month rejected Trump’s latest offer to prevent Congress from getting years out of its taxes. On Tuesday, another report gave summary information on Trump’s joint tax filings with his wife, Melania Trump, for tax years 2015 through 2020. This report, prepared by the Joint Committee on Taxation, showed Trump and Melania reported negative income over multiple years and paid $0 in tax income tax in 2020.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung slammed the Democrats’ actions, calling the “unprecedented leak” “evidence they’re playing a political game they’re losing” and urging them to release Trump’s tax returns. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband. “If this injustice can happen to President Trump, it can happen to all Americans for no reason,” Cheung’s statement said.
Wyden, in his Wednesday morning statement, argued that Trump’s tax returns “illustrate the flaws in our tax code and the consequences of Republicans’ decades-long struggle to gut the IRS.”
“These are far bigger issues than Donald Trump. Trump’s returns are likely to be like those of many other wealthy tax cheats – hundreds of partnership interests, highly questionable deductions and debts that can be moved to clear debts taxes,” Wyden said. .
“All of this is unchecked when you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to have your hundreds of partnerships audited,” he said.