The Internal Revenue Service audited both President Donald J. Trump's predecessor and his successor's tax returns once they took office, according to spokespeople for Barack Obama and Joe Biden on Wednesday, raising questions about how Mr. Trump escaped such scrutiny until Democrats in the House began investigating.
A House committee discovered late Tuesday that the IRS failed to audit Mr. Trump during his first two years in office, despite a law stating that "the individual tax returns for the president and the vice president are subject to obligatory inspection." However, the study did not specify whether the breach was due to widespread malfunction or if Mr. Trump received preferential treatment.
The release of routine audits of Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden when they were in office revealed that the agency's handling of Mr. Trump was an outlier.
"I'm totally stunned," Nina E. Olson, the national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019, stated. "It's upsetting. If you have a mechanism for auditing the president, you should be auditing the president."
According to reports issued by the Ways and Means Committee, which obtained Mr. Trump's tax data last month after a years-long legal battle, the IRS began its first audit of one of his filings as president in April 2019, the same day that the committee's chairman, Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts, inquired about the matter.
The IRS has yet to finish that audit, according to the article, and the agency only began reviewing documents documenting Mr. Trump's income while president after he left office. Even after the agency began looking into Mr. Trump's returns, it assigned only one agent to review them, up against a big team of attorneys and accountants who objected when the I.R.S. recruited two more people to help.
The committee's revelation that the I.R.S. violated its standards has renewed worries about possible politicisation at the agency during the Trump administration, prompting demands for the inspector general, who oversees the agency, to examine what went wrong. It has also sparked questions about why the Internal Revenue Service committed so few resources to scrutinising Mr. Trump, who had significantly more intricate tax returns than any prior president.
Under Mr. Trump, the Internal Revenue Service was led for the most of 2017 by a commissioner selected by Mr. Obama, John Koskinen, and — after nearly 11 months of oversight by an interim head, David J. Kautter — by a replacement appointed by Mr. Trump, Charles P. Rettig. None of them verified that the agency fulfilled the procedures that required presidential audits.
Mr. Rettig, who resigned in October, stated in an email sent Wednesday evening that he did not seek to meddle in Mr. Trump's audit.