House Panel Releases Trump's Tax Returns IRS Failed To Audit

The Democratic-led House Ways and Means Committee released a report on former President Donald Trump’s taxes Tuesday (Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022, in Manila) after voting to make public six years of Trump’s tax returns, the culmination of a years-long quest from House Democrats to obtain the former president’s taxes, Lauren Fox, Daniella Diaz and Jeremy Herb reported for CNN.

Photo Insert: The records they obtained showed that the presidential audit program failed to work as intended.

The panel approved a motion on a party-line vote to release the materials to the House, clearing the way for Trump’s tax returns to be released publicly within days.

The vote was approved with all Democrats voting in favor and all Republicans voting no. Reporting on this, The New York Times said that despite a mandate, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) failed to audit Trump during his first two years in office.

Trump filed returns in 2017 for the two previous tax years, but the IRS began auditing those filings only in 2019 — the first on the same day a House committee requested access to his taxes and any associated audits. The IRS has yet to complete those audits, it said.

Shortly after the vote, the committee released a report on the failures of the presidential audit program along with a supplemental report from the Joint Committee on Taxation that included details on Trump’s tax returns.

The panel voted to release all information from Chairman Richard Neal’s request to the IRS, which included Trump’s tax returns from 2015 to 2020. Those documents will need to undergo significant redactions first.

Neal told reporters Tuesday he expected the returns to be released in “only days.” The public release of the tax returns is another huge defeat for Trump, The Boston Globe noted.

Neal and the Democrats said Tuesday that the records they obtained showed that the presidential audit program failed to work as intended. Neal charged that the required audit of Trump’s taxes “did not occur,” as his returns were only subjected to the mandatory audit in 2019 after Democrats inquired.

The audit was important to Democrats because it was the justification they used to obtain the returns in the first place – but the pursuit was also tied in part to long-held suspicions about Trump’s taxes after he would not release his returns while running for president in 2016 or once in office, CNN’s Paul LeBlanc, Manu Raju and Kristin Wilson also reported.

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