House panel releases documents of presidential tax return request before Trump

Source: The Hill | July 25, 2019 | Naomi Jagoda

The House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday released documents showing Democrats’ request for President Trump’s tax returns is not the first time Congress has requested a president’s tax returns from the IRS.

The documents show that in 1973, the Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation requested then-President Richard Nixon’s tax returns from 1968 through 1972 from the IRS, and that the IRS provided the committee with the documents on the same day the request was made.

In January 1974, the committee requested Nixon’s tax returns from 1963 through 1967. The following month, the IRS provided the committee with the returns from 1966 and 1967, but the agency said it didn’t have the documents for the earlier years.

“The point that we were trying to make is that after reference and research and successfully seeking documentation, we were able to establish that in fact the Joint Committee on Taxation did use 6103 to review President Nixon’s returns,” Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) told reporters after the vote, referencing Section 6103 of the federal tax code.

Under Section 6103, the chairman of Congress’s tax committees — as well as the chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation, now called the Joint Committee on Taxation — can request tax returns from the Treasury Department. This is the same section of the tax code Neal used to request Trump’s personal and business tax returns for 2013 through 2018 from the IRS in April. 

The Treasury Department has rejected Neal’s request, leading Neal to file a lawsuit earlier this month in an effort to obtain Trump’s returns. The Trump administration has said on multiple occasions that they think Neal’s request is unprecedented.

But the documents the Ways and Means Committee released Thursday could help Neal to refute Treasury’s argument.

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