House passes bill requiring presidential tax audits after revelation Trump skirted scrutiny
The House on Thursday passed a bill that would require annual audits of the president’s tax returns, codifying IRS policy after a congressional committee revealed that the agency did not audit former President Trump during two years he was in office.
The legislation, titled the Presidential Tax Filings and Audit Transparency Act, passed in an 222-201 vote.
IRS policy requires that sitting presidents are audited every year — which has been the case since 1977 — but the terms are outlined in the agency’s regulatory manual, not federal law. The bill at hand would codify those terms into law.
The House took up the bill after the House Ways and Means Committee voted on Tuesday to release the report of its investigation into how the IRS’s mandatory audit program was run under the Trump administration. The vote also greenlit the release of six years of Trump’s tax returns, but they have not yet been published because officials are making redactions.
The report revealed that the IRS did not audit Trump in 2017 and 2018, despite the agency’s mandatory audit program for occupants of the White House. The then-president filed tax returns in 2017 and 2018, but the agency first audited him in 2019. The agency opened the examination on April 3 of that year — the same day Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), the chair of the committee, asked then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig for the president’s tax returns.
The legislation considered on Thursday specifically calls for audits of presidential tax returns and other entities controlled by the commander-in-chief to be carried out as quickly as possible after the information is filed. Additionally, the bill would mandate that the president’s tax returns are disclosed within 90 days of them being filed.
During debate on the House floor Thursday, Neal said his committee began probing the IRS’s mandatory presidential auditing four years ago to understand how the agency “was handling the stress of a president with complex finances.”
“The Committee expected to find that the mandatory examinations were conducted promptly, and that more staff had been dedicated to the program to meet the more rigorous demands. Instead, after years of stonewalling and litigation ending at the Supreme Court, the Committee found that, for all practical purposes, the mandatory audit program was dormant,” he said.
“It wasn’t just functioning poorly—it was not functioning at all,” he added.
The chairman said the “best available recourse” after the agency “failed to administer” its own policy “is for Congress to fill this void with legislation that eliminates the IRS’s discretion in the matter.”
“That’s what we are doing today,” he added.
Source: TEST FEED1
