The Trump Tax Return Whistleblower May Have Given Congress A ‘Bombshell’ Tip Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Kovensky

The Trump Tax Return Whistleblower May Have Given Congress A ‘Bombshell’ Tip

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Kovensky / 29min

It’s incredibly tantalizing.

A whistleblower tipped off the House Ways and Means committee to alleged misconduct in how the Internal Revenue Service is auditing President Donald Trump’s tax returns.

I spoke with a few experts in the arcane area of tax law that empowers committee Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) to make the request for Trump’s tax returns, and who have been tracking the committee’s sometimes plodding effort over the past several months.

I wrote about this potential bombshell of a tip last month, and Josh Marshall wrote about it yesterday.

Critically, Neal has staked part of his rationale for making the request on his committee’s need to oversee the IRS in its mandatory audit of the president’s returns.

Everyone I spoke with told me that the tip could prove to be a bombshell, but that even if it’s not Neal still has an overriding interest in telling a federal judge about it. As Steve Rosenthal, a tax expert at the Brookings Institution, put it to TPM, the existence of the tip “goes to the core” of Neal’s rationale in making the request. 

George Yin, a UVA law professor who wrote a widely circulated article on the section of the tax code that allows Ways and Means to obtain the returns of any filer, told TPM that the tip seems to “raise a further red flag about the IRS’s audit process.”

It sounds like this tip is suggesting that there is something inappropriate going on in that audit, and if that is in fact what he suggestion is, then it certainly would be information directly related to what Chairman Neal is looking at,” he added.

Taken in the context of Neal’s ongoing lawsuit to compel the release of Trump’s returns to Ways and Means, the tip came at an extremely fortuitous time.

Brooking Urban Policy expert Steven Rosenthal told TPM that the tip itself does not need to pan out into a full-fledged accounting of wrongdoing. The simple fact that a federal employee raised a concern, Rosenthal said, provides a basis for the kind of oversight that Neal is trying to conduct.

“Neal doesn’t have to show yet that there’s something amiss – that’s why you conduct oversight, to look for things that are amiss,” Rosenthal said. 

He added that certain elements of Neal’s handling of the whistleblower complaint suggest that the tipster may be availing him or herself of an exception in the tax code that permits disclosure to Congress of otherwise confidential information.

“The standard is that it can be disclosed if the whistleblower believes that misconduct might be taking place, with respect to IRS activity,” Rosenthal said, before suggesting that any information that the tipster may have revealed about Trump’s audit would likely fall under that category because it could otherwise “not be disclosed without criminal penalties.”

One irony of all this is that the reason presidential candidates, starting with Gerald Ford, began to disclose their tax returns is due to a forgotten post-Watergate scandal involving Richard Nixon.

Nixon had taken aggressive positions to the IRS on his taxes, and received favorable treatment. Congress opened an investigation, and found that the President owed more than $476,000 in back taxes and interest.

Rosenthal pointed out that that case came to light “because of a whistleblower.”

“That’s what tipped off Congress that the IRS was going easy on him,” he said.

Brian Galle, a professor at Georgetown law and tax attorney, told TPM that the concern now is that “the President or his allies might be inappropriately using their influence to shape the audit of the President or his friends.”

Galle added that Trump has shown himself willing to use his political influence and cross boundaries that previous presidents have held back from.

“We trust the professionalism of loyal, long-term, long-serving, experienced bureaucrats,” Galle said. “But the administration has shown its willingness to use every tool available to push professionals out and influence those who can be influenced.”

SHAREVISIT WEBSITE