We Haven't Seen Trump's Taxes Yet, but It's Clear the IRS Failed America [View all]

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We Haven’t Seen Trump’s Taxes Yet, but It’s Clear the IRS Failed America
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The IRS is required to conduct audits of the president and vice president while they are in office—but Trump apparently got a pass.
Shan Wu
Updated Dec. 22, 2022 6:21AM ET / Published Dec. 21, 2022 11:40PM ET 


The quest for Donald Trump’s taxes is finally over and whatever secrets Trump fought for years to conceal will soon be revealed for all to see. But one fact is already clear: The IRS botched its job.

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Perhaps this should not have been surprising given that Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was the first Treasury Secretary to refuse to turn over tax information in response to a congressional request and when Congress sued to obtain compliance a Trump-appointed judge–Trevor McFadden–delayed ruling on the case until after Trump had left office.

But it surely must be stunning to most Americans that among the reasons cited by IRS officials for their failure to follow policy was that they were apparently intimidated by the complexities of Trump’s taxes. In an internal memo, the agency seemed to whine about the return having “about 400 flow-through returns… and since some of these are tiered… a total of 500 flow-through returns”—which meant that to “do a thorough review of these returns we would need a team much larger than the current team.”

A “flow-through” entity is one in which the income that comes into the business passes onto the owner and is commonly used to reduce taxation.

In sum, the IRS rewarded Trump’s complex business structures by throwing their hands up at the prospect of having to dig into all those hundreds of records. Excuse me, but I thought that was what IRS agents liked to do?

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/we-havent-seen-trumps-taxes-yet-but-its-clear-the-irs-failed-america?ref=home