Washington, Dec 22 – The United States House of Representatives approved this Thursday a bill in favor of the tax returns of presidents being audited each year, after it was learned that those of Donald Trump (2017 -2021) were not controlled in his first two years in office.
The House of Representatives gave its approval by 222 votes in favor and 201 against, but the process in the Senate is still pending.
Among the five Republicans who backed that measure were Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, members of the legislative committee that has investigated Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol and has concluded that he was the most responsible.
The US Treasury (IRS, for its acronym in English) requires that the taxes of the White House tenants be audited each year, but those terms are written in the regulatory manual of that entity, not in federal law .
Trump was the first US president since Gerald Ford (1974-1977) who did not publish his tax return every year, a tradition that his predecessors considered part of their duty of transparency and accountability to the people.
After a legal battle dating back to 2019, the Supreme Court authorized the Treasury Department to deliver those Trump statements to a House committee that had requested them and the latter decided to publish them this week.
It was then that it was learned that the IRS did not audit the taxes of the former Republican president in his first two years in office, 2017 and 2018, and that it did not begin to do so until April 2029, when the aforementioned committee, of Ways and Means, requested by letter to Trump his tax information.
The president of that commission, Richard Neal, specified today in a statement that this bill does not seek to be “malicious or punitive”: “It will establish safeguards to correct the errors discovered earlier this week and will guarantee that the tax code is applied accordingly. equitably and fairly to everyone, including the president.