A Treasury Department watchdog “did not identify misconduct” during its investigation of fired FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe both being selected for a random audit by the IRS.
It was revealed in July that Comey was informed in 2019 he had been picked to have his 2017 tax returns examined by the IRS, according to the New York Times, while McCabe was informed in 2021, when former President Donald Trump was already out of office, that his 2019 returns would be scrutinized by the federal agency.
The fact that two high-profile former FBI officials whom Trump openly disdained had been audited raised allegations that they had been unfairly targeted by the IRS, which prompted the watchdog review.
The Treasury Department inspector general for tax administration found no evidence to back these claims of wrongdoing or political weaponization, concluding the selection was random.
“At the request of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue and representatives from Congress, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration initiated this review to determine if the IRS randomly selected individual tax returns for tax years 2017 and 2019 National Research Program audits,” the watchdog said Thursday.
The watchdog said for 2017 and 2019, the IRS’s Research Applied Analytics and Statistics organization “selected samples of more than 10,900 tax returns” for these audits and that “our assessment of the original sample selection process concluded that the IRS randomly selected tax years 2017 and 2019 tax returns” for the audits.
The inspector general also said IRS computer programs “categorized returns in the correct strata” and “correctly selected tax returns for audit,” and the computer systems “did not include malicious code that would force the selection of taxpayers” for an audit.
The watchdog further said IRS officials and an outside contractor “performed a return-by-return comparison between the replicated files and the original sample selection files to verify the files matched” and that “they concluded that the tax returns in the original samples were the same tax returns selected when the process was replicated.”
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Comey and his wife, Patrice, were found to have overpaid their 2017 federal income taxes and received a $347 refund, according to the report. McCabe told the publication that he and his wife, Jill, ended up paying the federal government a small amount of money they owed and said he believed the audit has been concluded. The Comeys paid roughly $5,000 in accountant fees and gave the IRS financial documents as well as a Christmas card to show they had children claimed as dependents, the report noted.
Asked by the New York Times to respond to the news of the audits this summer, a Trump spokesperson said, “I have no knowledge of this.”
IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, selected by Trump and kept on by President Joe Biden, rejected being involved in the Comey-McCabe audits.
“Commissioner Rettig is not involved in individual audits or taxpayer cases; those are handled by career civil servants,” the IRS said in a statement. “As I.R.S. commissioner, he has never been in contact with the White House — in either administration — on IRS enforcement or individual taxpayer matters. He has been committed to running the IRS in an impartial, unbiased manner from top to bottom.”
These IRS National Research Program audits pick taxpayers via a statistical software program that “does not entail employees manually selecting individuals for examination,” the agency said earlier this year.
“Federal privacy laws preclude us from discussing specific taxpayer situations,” the IRS said. “Audits are handled by career civil servants, and the IRS has strong safeguards in place to protect the exam process — and against politically motivated audits,” the statement continued. “It’s ludicrous and untrue to suggest that senior IRS officials somehow targeted specific individuals for National Research Program audits.”
Comey and McCabe both suggested they had been targeted politically.
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“I don’t know whether anything improper happened, but after learning how unusual this audit was and how badly Trump wanted to hurt me during that time, it made sense to try to figure it out,” Comey said this summer. “Maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe somebody misused the IRS to get at a political enemy.”
