‘Americans Should Be Greatly Outraged’ by Trump's Tax Returns
The IRS failed to audit Trump as required
The six years of tax returns from Donald Trump released by the House Ways and Means Committee Friday indicate that the former president paid very little in taxes, as well as a stunning failure to audit his taxes as required while he was in office.
Friday's release, the culmination of years of legal wrangling and speculation, included both personal and business records.
The committee raced to release the information before Republicans take control of the House next week.
The Ways and Means Committee separately released a 29-page report summarizing its investigation into an IRS policy that mandates audits of returns filed by presidents and vice presidents. The committee found that the IRS had largely not followed its own internal requirements, beginning to examine Trump’s returns only after the House panel inquired about the process. Just one year of Trump’s returns was officially selected for the mandatory review while he was in office, and that audit of Trump's 2016 taxes was not complete by the time he left the White House, according to the report.
“It’s outrageous both with regard to Trump personally and with regard to Trump's Internal Revenue Service administration. Here is the most powerful man in the world, the self-described clever genius, who brags of his wealth almost daily, and he did not pay the taxes that most modest wage earner in this country would pay,” said Rep Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas). “Nothing in one year, $750 a year in others. All of this related to the claims for big losses, big deductions, big credits, taking advantage of every loophole. And because of the sorry job that Trump’s Internal Revenue Service did, we don’t know how many of these were legal loopholes for the rich and how many of them were unjust and illegal, because the IRS didn’t do the job of auditing. The largest of his losses is $105 billion, and we did not see any investigation of that, nor did the Ways and Means Committee get those records.
“The excellent work that The New York Times did back in 2020 leads us to believe that that’s probably related to the failure of his Atlantic City casinos, but year after year he’s relying on losses to not pay much of anything. And I think Americans should be greatly outraged by that and by the failure of the IRS under Trump to do its job to audit him the way they have audited other presidents,” the congressman added, in an on-camera appearance on MSNBC.
The biggest shock was that the IRS failed in its duty, according to Rep Judy Chu (D-Calif), a member of Ways and Means.
“Trump was able to manipulate the tax system in order to pay very, very little over his presidency. And this should have been investigated by this mandatory presidential audit,” she said in a separate MSNBC interview. “The shock that came to all of us on the Ways and Means Committee last week, was that the mandatory audit was not being done by the IRS, there was only one mandatory audit that was done in one of those years, and none of the audits were ever actually completed.
“So, Donald Trump was able to get away with all of that because of this. And that mandatory tax audit needs to be reinstated with the proper resources that it needs to investigate somebody whose finances are as complicated as Trump's was,” Chu added.
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