A congressional committee may already have seen President Trump’s tax returns, at least for one year.
Former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen inadvertently raised the possibility that Congress reviewed some of Trump’s returns when he testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform last month that Trump bragged to him about a $10 million tax refund around the time of the 2008 financial crisis.
As the Trump Organization struggled with the fallout and cut employee salaries, “[H]e showed me what he claimed was a $10 million IRS tax refund,” said Cohen. “And he said that he could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like him that much money back.”
The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan committee with members from both the House and Senate, by law must review tax refunds to individuals of over $2 million. The JCT does so to monitor whether tax laws operate in the ways they are intended.
If Trump’s boast and Cohen’s testimony are true, then it’s possible a report or other information on Trump’s return from the year in question is at the National Archives. That information remains sealed for years unless requested by members of Congress. And even if members of Congress do obtain the tax information, the materials would remain under the same strict privacy law that governs the handling of personal tax information.
Former JCT chief of staff George Yin, now a law professor at the University of Virginia, said that any tax information requested by the committee would be protected by the section of the tax code protecting taxpayer confidentiality. “Typically what would be pulled and sent over would not be the whole return … but a summary of the claim” with personal information protected, said Yin.
A spokesperson for the House Ways and Means Committee did not respond to multiple requests for comment as to whether the committee has sought related information from JCT or the National Archives. Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass. is the current chairman of the nonpartisan JCT; the committee’s gavel rotates between the chairs of the House and Senate tax-writing committees.
Neal has promised to pursue Trump’s tax returns. As the chairman of Ways and Means, he is authorized to request taxpayer information from the IRS and is preparing to do so. The possibility that JCT or the National Archives already have some of Trump’s returns, however, means that he might be able to access the information more easily and without having to fight the Trump administration for it.
Multiple former congressional staffers with experience in tax-related investigations have suggested that the JCT could allow Congress to review a broader range of Trump’s returns for any potential irregularity. JCT’s staff has professional experience reviewing, and keeping secret, tax returns through its mandate to review large refunds, and through other reports to Congress the committee prepares using taxpayer information.
Neal could ask JCT Chief of Staff Tom Barthold to request and review Trump’s tax returns, as well as those of his company. Under the same law that grants the chairs of tax policy committees in the House and Senate the ability to ask for and receive returns for review, the chief of staff of the JCT can also request returns from the Treasury Department. The information is treated with the same care that the intelligence community uses with classified information, including potential prison time for leaks. JCT staff could then write a report detailing what they found for Neal, who could put to a vote before the House of Representatives whether to make the report public, although there could be legal hurdles related to law protecting the privacy of tax returns.
A JCT request and review would also limit the possibility that members of Congress might leak sensitive tax information, either inadvertently or for political reasons.
“My experience has been that members don’t understand what they can talk about and what they can’t talk about,” said a former Democratic staffer. “I would hope that if they request the returns it would not be a partisan thing.”
But Yin wasn’t so sure routing a Trump tax return investigation through JCT would work.
“My guess is that probably puts the chief of staff in a very difficult position, and if I were in that position I would want direction from the entire joint committee,” said Yin. That would include the top Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who has said he would request Trump’s returns only if Democrats succeed in obtaining them.
