Cue the army of volunteers prepared to scour for minutiae: The House Ways and Means Committee voted to release six years’ worth of Donald Trump’s tax returns, allowing every armchair pundit (like us) to dissect the info, the New York Times reports.
In a post-meeting press gaggle, committee chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) noted that the reason the Committee and the Joint Committee on Taxation wanted the taxes was to determine if the presidential audit system was operating functionally. The committee found that no such audit, a standard practice for every president’s tax returns, had been undertaken in 2017, 2018 or 2019.
“Once [committee] staff [reviewed IRS operations], they quickly concluded that in fact, the audit [of Trump’s taxes] did not occur,” Neal stated. “There were no audits in a timely manner, and that goes I think for 2017, 2018 and 2019.”
The move is politically devious: while the exact date that the information will be released is unknown, it will crowdsource the review to thousands of tax experts–and millions of people who will peruse the information. The documents must be scrubbed of personal information such as Social Security numbers and birthdates before being released.
The Committee has the authority to audit any specific tax return it seeks to examine how “It was never about being punitive. It was never about being malicious,” Neal stated, emphasizing that the Committee’s work was to determine how the audit process worked for the President versus other filers and to oversee how the presidential audit requirement was handled.
Trump had promised to release his taxes when he was toying with the idea of running for President. In 2014, Trump declared, “If I decide to run for office, I’ll produce my tax returns, absolutely.” He had earlier tied releasing his tax returns to President Barack Obama releasing his birth certificate, which Obama had done in 2008 when racists like Trump claimed Obama was born in Kenya. (Obama was, in fact, born in Hawaii.) Trump never released any of his tax returns, claiming they were always under audit and therefore could not be released. (Any individual can release the tax forms he submitted to the IRS; there is no rule against doing so while you’re being audited.)