Trump and the IRS: A massive tax cheat and a hapless, corrupt agency [View all]

[marmar]

Trump and the IRS: A massive tax cheat and a hapless, corrupt agency
We can't be sure whether Trump cheated in claiming huge tax losses — but the IRS didn't even bother to investigate

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
Columnist
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 21, 2022 9:56AM (EST)


(Salon) Back in February of 2019, then-President Donald Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen, testified before the House Oversight Committee that his former employer had once shown him a big refund from the IRS and told him "he could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like him that much money back."

It turns out that the man who once claimed in a presidential debate that not paying any taxes made him "smart" was right about that. The IRS is stupid, or at least lazy and incompetent. It let Donald Trump off the hook for years.

On Tuesday the House Ways and Means Committee finally broke its silence and announced that after years of legal battles and delays it would release Trump's tax returns to the public, as they are authorized to do by the same law Republicans invoked when they investigated the IRS back in 2014. That probe, which was supposed to show that the IRS had targeted conservative organizations, actually made clear that the agency had targeted progressive groups as well. But this investigation looks like it exposed a real scandal. The only question is whether the IRS will take the fall for this entire mess or whether Donald Trump will finally be fully exposed for his egregious pattern of tax evasion.

The committee released a report on its findings Tuesday night, as did the Joint Committee on Taxation, which delved into some of the details of the returns themselves. The first big takeaway is that the IRS, which is supposed to audit all presidential tax returns under the Mandatory Presidential Audit Program, never even got around to looking at Trump's. It was only after the committee began its inquiries in 2019 that the IRS finally opened an investigation of Trump's 2016 returns, even though it had been tasked by that time with auditing him from 2015 through 2018.

That's very strange, to put it mildly, and it certainly validates the committee's stated premise for opening the case. Its members are now recommending that the Mandatory Audit Program, which has been in place since the Carter administration, be codified into law. ..........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/12/21/and-the-irs-a-massive-cheat-and-a-hapless-corrupt-agency/