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The main tax committee in the House voted Tuesday night to release six years of tax returns belonging to former President Trump as part of an investigation into the presidential audit program at the IRS. The vote was 24-16 and fell along party lines, with Democrats voting in favor and Republicans voting against.
The returns include six years of personal returns as well as returns for eight of Trump’s businesses. They’ll be released within a few days following redactions, committee members said Tuesday.
Reports from the Ways and Means Committee about the IRS’s presidential audit program as well as from the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) on the content of the tax returns have already been released.
Here’s what we know from their reports and from what lawmakers have been saying.The IRS didn’t audit Trump in 2017 or 2018 and Democrats want to know why
The IRS has a mandatory audit program for sitting presidents, but didn’t audit Trump until more than two years after he assumed the presidency. Trump filed two tax returns in 2017 and one in 2018, but only received his first audit while he was in office in 2019.
“There were no audits in a timely manner,” Ways and Means Committee chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said Tuesday.
“Once [committee] staff went to visit the IRS, once staff had a chance to go to some of the … locations that are within the jurisdictions of the IRS, they quickly concluded that in fact the audit did not occur,” he said.
Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden said in a Wednesday statement that the “IRS was asleep at the wheel.”
“The presidential audit program is broken. There is no justification for the failure to conduct the required presidential audits until a congressional inquiry was made. I have additional questions about the extent to which resource issues or fear of political retaliation from the White House contributed to lapses here,” he said.
Trump’s two audit-free years may be part of the reason that no audits of the president were concluded during his time in office and that those started during the latter part of his term have yet to be finished. Tax experts say complex audits usually take several years.
“Not surprising,” Steve Rosenthal, an analyst with the Tax Policy Center who has testified to Congress about Trump’s tax returns, said in an interview about those audits remaining incomplete. “The IRS takes years to finish complicated audits.”
The presidential audit program is an IRS policy outlined in the agency’s regulatory manual, not a federal law. Neal showed off legislation he was introducing Tuesday evening to turn the policy into a law, but the future of that proposal is uncertain since the House is about to flip from Democratic to Republican control.
