is the committee s investigation that found that the mandatory presidential audit system that the irs employs for all sitting president, they said it was dormant during the trump years. they said it is an essential program because they need to ensure that a president is not compromised in any way in signing legislation into law. but they say it was not essentially in use until april of 2019. and that is when richard neal, the chairman of the ways and means committee, a democrat, started to inquire about donald trump s tax returns. they say at that point that s when the irs audit program kicked into gear, and they say it never was completed over the six years returns that they ultimately obtained. now there is a separate report by the joint committee on taxation analyzing those returns. it raises some questions about some of the deductions that donald trump took, suggested that perhaps more investigation might be warranted. it did not make a judgment one way or the other, but it got in
years six recent years as well as not just his individual returns but his business returns as well. that vote 24-16 along party lines to release both a report from the committee investigating this as well as all of those returns. now first on the report the two that were released late on tuesday night, one of which is the committee s investigation that found that the mandatory presidential audit system that the irs employs for all sitting presidents, they say it was dormant during the trump years. that is an essential program because they need to ensure that a president is not compromised in any way in signing legislation into law. they said it was not essentially in use until april of 2019. that was when the chairman of the ways and means committee started to inquire about donald trump s tax returns. they say at that point that s when the irs audit program kicked into gear and they said it never was completed over the six years of returns that they
years. it wasn t even until april of 2019, when the chairman of our committee, richard neil, sent the letter to the irs, to the treasury department, asking for these returns under section 61 of the tax code. it wasn t all that very day that the first of these returns were flagged for audit. they had simply failed to do that at all. and they never completed any of the so-called mandatory audit of the president of the united states during president trump s term of office, during his tenure as president, the mandatory reporting, or mandatory auditing requirements under the irs code book, under their internal rules was completely avoided. i find that stunning to think that that could have been the case. and just the idea, and again, you talk about some of the criticism of the wind now and the idea, is there really a legitimate legislative purpose here? there is the statements by some
see the extent to which the president, then president, was able to avoid what most of us would say is their fair share of taxes. he s a very wealthy individual. but the real point of this, and the other surprise to me, if there was a surprise, is that this mandatory audit program that we re aware of at the irs, that goes back to the nixon era, was dormant during the trump years. it wasn t even until april of 2019, when the chairman of our committee, richard neal, sent the letter to the irs, to the treasury department, asking for these returns under section 61 of the tax code. it wasn t all that very day that the first of these returns were flagged for audit. they had simply failed to do that at all. and they never completed any of the so-called mandatory audits of the president of the united states during president trump s term of office, during his
of tax returns. you ve talked about the legislative, the policy element here. i want to play for you what you said. this is april of 2019 about the goals of, the requests of these returns. let s be clear, we re not asking for these returns to be made public. it s not even clear that other members of the committee, myself included will ever see any of this information. this is specific to chairman neal because he needs this information in order to frame the questions that we are trying to answer and the policies that we are trying to potentially enact. so now why are they being made public? well, because we were able to do the analysis. we didn t ask when we sent the request under 6103 in april of 2019. we didn t ask then for the irs to publicize the documents. we asked them to provide them to us so that we can do the analysis required. after having done that analysis, we made the determination that