The IRS never completed its audits of Trump. Now he will have to answer to the public.
Several years’ worth of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns are finally being made public after years of legal battles and congressional inquiries, suggesting that it will become more difficult for him to shield his business dealings from scrutiny after evading mandatory audits for years.
The House Ways and Means Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to release Trump’s tax returns for 2015 through 2020. It will likely be a few days before the full records are released, since lawmakers have to redact personal information such as Social Security numbers from the documents. But reports published Tuesday by the Ways and Means Committee and the Joint Committee on Taxation provide a glimpse at the most troubling parts of Trump’s tax returns — and at the IRS’s failure to hold him to account.
The IRS has had an agency policy of auditing individual tax returns for presidents and vice presidents every year dating back to the Nixon era. But under Trump — who was the first president to refuse to publicly release his tax returns on the premise that he was under audit, even though there was nothing to legally prevent him from doing so — the program went dark.
“We anticipated the IRS would expand the mandatory audit program to account for the complex nature of the former president’s financial situation yet found no evidence of that,” Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) said during a hearing Tuesday. “This is a major failure of the IRS under the prior administration, and certainly not what we had hoped to find.”
According to the committee’s report, it wasn’t until 2019, two years into Trump’s presidency, that the IRS initiated an audit of his tax returns. The agency did so on the same day the committee asked for copies of Trump’s tax returns and related audits, and it didn’t begin its audits of tax returns filed during his presidency until after he had left office. None of the audits have been completed yet.
The IRS is severely underresourced, and House Democrats have suggested that it doesn’t have the capability to handle complex tax cases. However, some government observers have also expressed concern that the Trump administration improperly influenced the agency.
“It suggests that this was another example of the federal government being politicized by Donald Trump’s administration and misused for his benefit,” said Noah Bookbinder, president and CEO of the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
