IRS Failed to Audit Trump for First 2 Years in Office: Report

Hours after the House Ways and Means Committee voted to release six years of former President Trump's tax returns, it released a 29-page report on its findings regarding the Internal Revenue Service's mandatory presidential audit program. The report, which you can read in full here, reveals that the IRS did not audit Trump during his first two years as president, the New York Times reports. Rather, according to the report, a still-not-completed audit was started after Rep. Richard E. Neal, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the committee, asked the IRS for Trump's taxes in 2019.

As the AP notes, the revelation raises "questions about statements by the former president and leading members of his administration who claimed he could not release his tax filings because of the ongoing reviews" by the IRS. The report does not suggest Trump discouraged the IRS from auditing him, but it says the agency's mandatory presidential audit program, which requires that a president's tax filings be audited, was "dormant at best" during the first two years Trump was in office. An accompanying report from Congress' nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation also took issue with the IRS agents in charge of audits of Trump companies, who reportedly failed to bring in specialists of their own because Trump hired his own accounting team. (More Donald Trump stories.)