The IRS “was asleep on the wheel” when it got here to handling former President Donald Trump’s tax returns, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said Wednesday.
“The presidential audit program is broken,” Wyden said in an announcement vowing to work to pass laws to reform that decades-old program.
His assessment got here after the House Ways and Means Committee reported that the IRS had only began one mandatory audit of Trump’s personal income tax returns during his 4 years within the White House — though the agency’s rules required annual audits of the president’s tax returns.
That sole mandatory audit of Trump’s 2016 tax return was not accomplished while he was in office, in line with the House panel’s investigation, which concluded that the presidential audit program was “dormant, at best,” in the course of the Trump administration.
“There isn’t a justification for the failure to conduct the required presidential audits until a congressional inquiry was made,” Wyden’s statement said.
“I actually have additional questions on the extent to which resource issues or fear of political retaliation from the White House contributed to lapses here,” the senator added.
The IRS didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s request for comment on Wyden’s statement.
The Ways and Means Committee’s report on the presidential audit program was released after the panel’s Democratic majority voted to release redacted copies of Trump’s federal income tax returns. That vote followed a yearslong legal battle with Trump, who had fought to maintain his tax information out of the committee’s hands.
Trump broke with a long time of electoral precedent by refusing to publicly release his tax returns, each when he was running for president in 2016 and after winning that election. On the time, Trump claimed he was restricted from releasing the returns due to an ongoing IRS audit, though fact-checkers have reported that he still could have released them.
The Supreme Court last month rejected Trump’s final bid to stop Congress from obtaining years of his taxes. On Tuesday, one other report gave summary details about Trump’s joint tax filings together with his wife, Melania Trump, for the tax years 2015 through 2020. That report, prepared by the Joint Committee on Taxation, showed that Trump and Melania declared negative income on multiple years’ tax returns and paid $0 in federal income taxes in 2020.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung slammed Democrats’ actions, calling the “unprecedented leak” as “proof they’re playing a political game they’re losing” and urging them to release tax returns of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband. “If this injustice can occur to President Trump, it may possibly occur to all Americans without cause,” Cheung’s statement said.
Wyden in his statement Wednesday morning argued Trump’s tax returns “exemplify the shortcomings of our tax code and consequences of Republicans’ decades-long fight to gut the IRS.”
“These are issues much larger than Donald Trump. Trump’s returns likely look just like those of many other wealthy tax cheats — a whole bunch of partnership interests, highly-questionable deductions, and debts that might be shifted around to wipe out tax liabilities,” Wyden said.
“All of this goes completely unchecked while you’re more more likely to get struck by lightning than have your a whole bunch of partnerships audited,” he said.
