The following is a statement by Amy Hanauer, executive director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, in response to yesterday’s announcement that President Trump and his family are suing the IRS over the leak of his tax returns by an IRS contractor:
“Several years ago, an IRS contractor leaked confidential tax return data on the nation’s wealthiest people to various news outlets. Under laws written to protect the wealthy from public scrutiny, that leak was illegal, but it revealed information that Americans deserved to have. It confirmed our worst fears about a tax system that often allows the very best-off individuals to pay a vastly smaller share of their income in federal taxes than the rest of us pay. And it revealed that the wealthiest U.S. president in history, Donald Trump, who broke long-standing precedent by refusing to disclose his tax and financial details, had long avoided paying the taxes funding the government over which he presided.
Trump, who is estimated to have wealth between $5 and $7 billion, now demands that American taxpayers give him $10 billion to compensate him for not being allowed to keep his tax avoidance a secret from them.
There is no precedent for a sitting president to sue the government agencies that report to him. Make no mistake, there is little chance that the government officials involved will respond to this astonishing situation objectively as they might if any other individual besides Donald Trump was involved.
Trump’s bending previously independent agencies to his will leaves us with no reason to give this government the benefit of the doubt regarding its ability to follow normal rules and procedures in dealing with the Trump family.
Even if an unbiased judge rightly rejects Trump’s demands as preposterous, there is a great danger that the IRS would “agree” to settle and pay out an enormous sum of taxpayer dollars to Trump.
To be clear, many billionaires had their tax returns leaked in this incident but none of them, aside from Mr. Trump and his family, are currently seeking monetary damages from the IRS.
A legal remedy has already been provided for the leak. The contractor who leaked this information has been imprisoned, the Trump administration’s Treasury Department cancelled its contracts with the company that employed the leaker, and the IRS issued a rare public apology to taxpayers affected by the leak. On top of that, the IRS has pledged to strengthen its data protection procedures in the wake of this incident and, as President, Mr. Trump has the authority to ensure those new safeguards are as robust as possible.
None of this matters to Donald Trump, whose real problem is that he simply does not see any boundary between what belongs to We the People of the United States and what belongs to him personally.”
