The following editorial originally appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
A gaping question remains to be answered following the House Ways and Means Committee’s decision to release Donald Trump’s tax returns: Why did the Internal Revenue Service fail to audit Trump’s taxes during the first two years of his presidency, as required by law? There’s a growing mountain of circumstantial evidence suggesting that Trump used political pressure and strategic appointments of loyalists to block IRS auditors from doing their job.
If that’s the case, it would hardly be surprising, given Trump’s track record. But it would mean that someone, somewhere, violated the law, possibly at Trump’s behest. Either way, the matter requires further investigation — a dubious prospect by the House as it transitions from Democratic to Republican control.
The most probable choice for the next House speaker, Trump loyalist Kevin McCarthy, is on record as having repeatedly railed against beefed-up IRS staffing, portraying the agency in evil-versus-good terms. It’s as if he thinks it’s a crime for the agency to pursue Americans who evade paying the taxes they owe. McCarthy falsely asserts there’s a Democrat plot to deploy a “new army of 87,000 IRS agents” to target Americans with incomes of less than $75,000.
The ones who are most abusing the law are the nation’s richest — people like Trump — whose tax-skirting exploits have robbed the national treasury of an estimated $7 trillion over the past decade, according to The New York Times.
