Thread: Many public officials must share their tax returns. Why not the president?

Many public officials must share their tax returns. Why not the president?

The Internal Revenue Service headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

By Mark A. Patterson August 17, 2016

The debate over Donald Trump’s tax returns overlooks an important point: The lack of any mechanism to require presidential candidates to disclose their returns means that our system holds candidates for the nation’s highest office to a much lower standard than many applicants for lesser federal positions.

Donald Trump's evolution on candidate tax returns


Play Video1:55
Donald Trump's stance on presidential candidates has changed significantly over the years. Here's how.(Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

Dozens of nominees to Cabinet- and sub-Cabinet-level positions in the Treasury Department, Social Security Administration, Department of Homeland Security, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and other agencies are required to submit their tax returns to the Senate, where they are reviewed by the relevant Senate committee, sometimes working with the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Many (although not all) senior federal appointments are subject to this requirement, which is imposed to ensure that people in positions of public trust have complied with the law. There is no exception to the requirement for people who are being audited by the Internal Revenue Service; in fact, nominees are asked detailed questions about any current or recent audits. Regardless of whether a nominee is under audit, Senate committees that require submission of tax returns will not act on a nomination until those returns have been provided and reviewed.The tax-review process of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over nominations to multiple executive branch agencies, is particularly stringent. The committee requires nominees to submit tax returns for the most recent three years, and if any concerns are identified in those returns, the committee may require the nominee to provide returns covering the past 10 years. The committee staff also conducts interviews of nominees. If the committee determines that a nominee’s taxes have not been paid in full, it offers a choice: The committee can release a public report detailing the noncompliance and require immediate payment of those amounts, or the nominee can withdraw and the committee will keep the tax information confidential.

It makes no sense whatsoever for candidates for the presidency — the office charged under our Constitution with seeing to the faithful execution of the laws — to be held to a weaker accountability standard than subordinate federal officials are.

To correct this problem, Congress should act immediately to require public disclosure of tax returns by presidential candidates. And in the interim, if Trump continues to refuse to release his returns, he should at the least submit them to the Senate Finance Committee (which is controlled by Republicans) or the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation for review and a public report on his compliance. If, as he maintains, he has satisfied his tax obligations, he should have nothing to fear from such a review.

Republicans in Congress would presumably support such a move by Trump. Over the past eight years, Republican senators and staff have devoted a tremendous amount of time and energy to scrutinizing the tax returns of President Obama’s nominees. Many of these nominees were required not only to submit multiple years of returns, but also to answer dozens of detailed questions about sources of income, deductions, investments, tax treatment (and immigration status) of domestic employees and other topics.

Republican senators who have demanded this information from lesser officials should hold the GOP presidential nominee to at least the same standard of accountability.

Trump told one interviewer that a question about his taxes was “none of your business.” But public disclosure of presidential candidates’ tax returns has been the accepted practice in the modern era, and for good reason. Paying taxes is a fundamental obligation of citizenship, and the public deserves to know whether its next leader has fulfilled this obligation.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=.8eef659feb44

Trump's tax returns are no one's business. No one's tax returns are anyone else's business. The income tax is an awful thing, a terrible thing, it works in opposition to everything the United States was founded upon and was designed to do and achieve. The income tax was passed in 1913 by Democrats and any Republican, any Real Republican, who supports any aspect of this awful tax, including trying to pressure a President of the United States or any candidate for this office to disclose tax returns for political reasons, is playing the drum for the Democratic Party, the Socialists, the Authoritarians, and the very people who have used this tax to bankrupt our nation with over $20 trillion of national debt and leave 1/3 of our working age population out of the work force.

Personally, I think all candidates, congresscritters, top management of any government organization and department needs to either make their tax return either public, or on record so it can be checked if necessary.

I think we need something like that to try to get a handle on the pay offs that we know are happening in our government.

How do people go up there and draw a good, but not astronomical salary - stay 8 years and they are suddenly multi-millionaires.

No they are not required to release taxes for public view.

With so much media bias why give them more ammo against President Trump because we know they would find something to make a HUGE issue about within his tax returns? There are much more important issues to report on imo.

Originally Posted by Jean

With so much media bias why give them more ammo against President Trump because we know they would find something to make a HUGE issue about within his tax returns? There are much more important issues to report on imo.

I hear what you're saying and personally could care less about the contents of Trump's tax returns. However, it was a promise he made multiple times during his presidential campaign. I know politicians make lots of promises they never keep, but I was somehow hoping Trump's sense of integrity wouldn't allow him to go down that road.

So he gets a pass on this promise and the DACA promise, what promises do we give him a pass on next? All I'm saying is he should do his absolute best to keep any promises he made. Both his taxes and DACA promise are within his power to keep.