The intense tax audits of former FBI leaders were the result of random selection, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration — not malice on the part of the Trump administration.
The tax returns of former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe were among those chosen for the Internal Revenue Service's National Research Program in 2019 and 2021, respectively. Given that relatively few returns are selected for the NRP program — which aims to collect compliance data for different types of taxes and various sets of taxpayers — and that both Comey and McCabe had strong disagreements with the Trump administration, concerns had been raised in the summer of 2022 in the media and by congressional leaders that the two men's returns may have been deliberately chosen.
However, a newly released report from TIGTA says that the tax return selection process for the NRP for both years was indeed random, and that "the computer programs used to select the tax returns worked as designed and did not include malicious code that would force the selection of specific taxpayers for an NRP audit."
TIGTA examined the sampling process and software that the IRS's Research Applied Analytics and Statistics unit used to select returns for audit, and concluded that they worked as designed.
It did note that resources constraints at the IRS — the budget of which has shrunk significantly over the past decade – had led to the RAAS deviating from its established return selection process in ways that might allow for specific returns to be targeted, but this summer, at the request of the IRS, an independent contractor replicated the RAAS's process and confirmed that the selection had, in fact, been random.
In addition, TIGTA interviewed a number of key IRS and RAAS officials, including then-Commissioner Charles Rettig, and found no evidence that anyone had unduly influenced the NRP, nor that anyone in the Trump administration had directed the IRS to target any individual taxpayers for it.
"Tax compliance and confidence in the fairness of the tax system could decline if taxpayers believe that the IRS targets specific taxpayers for NRP audits for inappropriate purposes," Inspector General J. Russell George said in a statement explaining, in part, why TIGTA undertook the investigation.
