Well, my error! When I read the letter, this FAQ was attached as though it was one document: link.
I was totally puzzled why Neal would send a letter and a FAQ, but now I see some news organization combined them for their readers (I can’t remember which website I read it on).
Sure didn’t stop Congress from investigating buttery males like Ben Ghazi.
From the AP: Chief of staff says Dems will ‘never’ see Trump tax returns
Showdown time!
Here’s an angle: If the head of the IRS refuses to turn over these documents as legally required, that’d be grounds to impeach him. And his successor, if whoever that is tries the same thing.
The difference between “grounds to impeach him” and “will impeach him” approaches infinity, y’know.
It’s a law. It’s simply the law. If the IRS refuses, then whoever makes that call from the IRS should be arrested.
Yes. As Matthew Miller observed today on Twitter:
Mulvaney is proudly asserting that the IRS head is Trump’s creature, and that Trump is above the law. There is no good reason for Congress to simply let that pass.
Yeah, at some point I could see a judge just holding someone in contempt if the judge rules that the law is as simple as it reads.
I read the law in question a while ago. I think I may have encountered it during a completely unrelated tax research project instead of looking for it specifically, but that’s not too relevant. It was quite clear that the two Chairmen of the committees in each chamber of Congress have the right to request absolutely anyone’s tax return. However, after doing so they must not disclose any information in it to the general public.
However , I think people in general are overly optimistic about the kinds of things that are found on an actual tax return. You don’t report to the IRS every single detail about what’s on your returns - you provide summaries and occasionally there are times you need to file required statements when the amount of space on the forms is too small to fit what’s required by the form, but in general, the returns are only the very broadest of strokes.
There is a little bit of detail you will get, and that’s who their employers are and what pass-through entities they are receiving income from. That all shows up on the return, associated with a federal taxpayer number (TIN/EIN, like an SSN), but seeing them there isn’t going to tell you the nature of their business (besides what you can tell from how the K-1 income is divvied up among the various types of income). Of course, if they can subsequently request that business’s return they can get more information about them, such as the other partners, but it still won’t tell you anything much about the details of the business. If they have real estate rentals they’ll tell you what addresses they have, but for other kinds of business transactions, there is no such requirement to report the sources of income and the identities of those to whom expenses were paid. A total interest expense will be reported, but no details of who the interest is paid to. The balance sheet will list how much debt they have, but not to whom it is owed. Although you are supposed to report debt from owners of the business separately, that doesn’t tell you which owner holds that debt.
I’m not sure what people expect to find on Trump’s tax returns other than that he simply isn’t nearly as wealthy as he leads people to believe. That’s what Trump is really hiding, because if he has extra-legal business associations, it would be relatively simple to just not report them on his tax return, or to report what their legal facade was (ie, what was reported to the IRS). Without an audit of the return, you won’t have any idea whether any of the information is actually true with the exception of those few things reported to the IRS like W-2s and K-1s, and even for those, the documents may be based on false information and entirely made up and as long as it’s reported consistently the IRS won’t notice unless they audit everyone involved.
Similarly, you won’t get any information on which charities were donated to. You might type all the information into Turbo Tax and it might generate a detail report that might be included with your return, but that doesn’t mean that in general people are required to report each and every donation. The vast majority of my firm’s clients provide us a list of contributions already added up, we go over the list to ensure they are all legitimate charities because some people like to include political donations on the list, and if everything’s good, we just type the bottom line number into the software. That’s all the IRS sees.
And it’s like that for pretty much every other line as well. “Other expenses” on business returns will be broken out into types, but every individual expense won’t be listed. When people hear about how long some firm’s tax returns are, and there are some doozies in our office, it’s because they have a huge number of different K-1s each with several pages of detail, most of which is blank, or it’s because they have a huge number of properties and can only put 3 on each page plus they may need extra space to itemize all the “other expenses” by type, or it’s because they have a large number of transactions that require reporting because they are a day-trader, or any number of other reasons, but these don’t tell you what entities the businesses were giving money to, only the sources of their income, and then only vaguely.
What I find funny is the GOP claiming that a law can’t be used for political purposes. Or that it sets a bad precedent. Somehow that did not matter when it came to ignoring Garland for the supreme court.
Once an entity learns it will pay NO price for hypocrisy, it will employ hypocrisy continuously and without ceasing.
IOWRDI*
*It’s okay when Republicans do it.
How would you be able figure out who leaked it?
Exactly!#
Or when they used the exact same law five years ago to get tax returns, for blatantly political purposes.
IANAL, but while it seems on the face of the rule it is clear cut the IRS shall provide them to particular members of Congress… what makes people so sure that SCOTUS will take that side? Sure, the usual suspects absolutely, but Thomas? Kavanaugh? Gorsuch? They’re partisan hacks. Will they be able to actually do it? Or do we just depend on only Roberts being able to read and/or care about legacies and precedent? If this goes to SCOTUS, anything short of a 9-0 (or x-0 if someone was out sick) is very, very troubling.
And if ordered by SCOTUS, I don’t know if I have enough faith in our system anymore that the appropriate person at the IRS would comply. It seems sucking up to Trump is easier than than following norms and traditions and laws. How do you make the IRS comply? Contempt? Can that be pardoned? Do you shut off their funding? What can one party who controls only one branch do when other government departments don’t look to them as having power?
An interesting article about how the elite team of auditors put together by the IRS to tackle the biggest tax cheats has been systematically outgunned and destroyed by Republicans.
Sure, there’s no chance that Trump is hiding something. Zeeeero. Fake news.
I used to think an announcement on the scale of “Reefer Is Legal” would be big news. Now I’m waiting for Republicans to declare that laws don’t mean shit, whatever they are, if you don’t like them. Thanks Republicans, for establishing anarchy. I sure hope you don’t regret it. 
From the article:
And this is why I’m the Chicken Little of SDMB - because we’re witnessing the transformation of American democracy to American oligarchy. This is exactly how oligarchies, plutocracies, and kleptocracies behave. This is even how the United States operated at many levels of government from the late 1800s until 1930. The Roaring 20s was a time of rampant wealth inequality, and in turn, rampant corruption, with Republicans of the day stuffing their stockings with tax dollars and using federal office as their own piggy banks. What’s more, just like then, most Americans were simply not concerned enough to do anything to stop them - because they were employed and in their view, as long as they could believe in the American pipe dream, then nobody had to be held accountable. That changed, but only in 1932, after nearly 4 years of extreme financial hardship. That is where we are headed, and I doubt anything can stop it from happening.
Can we amend Mulvaney’s name on to the request?