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Charles Rettig
Photo:
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
The Internal Revenue Service will end the year with more cash and less credibility than ever. That’s because the Biden Administration demanded no answers for the agency’s failures before arming it with $80 billion in new funding this summer.
But there’s one way the agency can regain trust that should appeal to President Biden and his bureaucrats: Prove or disprove the allegation that President Trump influenced audits of
James Comey
and
Andrew McCabe.
That claim resurfaced this week when former White House chief of staff
John Kelly
said Mr. Trump mulled siccing the IRS on the two former FBI officials between 2017 and 2018. Mr. Kelly told the
New York Times
that the President asked him to “get the IRS on” the two men as part of a pattern of using “his authority as president against people who had been critical of him.”
Mr. Trump often popped off in the White House about getting some enemy or another, and little ever came of it. The idea that the IRS was the rare federal bureaucracy that actually followed Mr. Trump’s orders also strikes us as highly unlikely, and Mr. Trump has said he knows nothing about it.
The issue in this case is that Messrs. Comey and McCabe came under IRS scrutiny in an unlikely way. Both men were audited under the agency’s National Research Program during the tenure of Commissioner
Charles Rettig,
a Trump appointee. Audits of that type are especially thorough, and subjects are ostensibly chosen by an algorithm. Only about 5,000 taxpayers are selected for the audits each year.
Messrs. Comey and McCabe discovered the coincidence in July, and House Democrats demanded answers from the IRS, eager to prove that the audits were a Trump political hit. Mr. Rettig asked the agency’s inspector general to investigate. But the investigation has outlasted Mr. Rettig, who was replaced last month by an acting commissioner.
Add this to the growing list of IRS mishaps and unsolved mysteries. Two months ago the agency said it had accidentally published the private tax information of 120,000 people. They chalked that one up to a man-made coding error—whoops! Mr. Rettig and his staff still haven’t traced the origin of the June 2021 leak to progressive website ProPublica, which has published private tax information.
Mr. Kelly’s claims this week spurred House Democrats to send another letter seeking answers from the IRS. Republicans have vowed to oversee the IRS more vigorously if they take the House majority. One way to do that with credibility would be to examine all alleged abuses, regardless of party or politics.
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