Trump's Man On The Inside At The IRS
To most Americans, this is Tax Day 2019, but to many of the superrich, it’s a glorious and lucrative day — Tax Secrecy Day.
Before 1925 tax returns were public. Newspapers ran accounts each April detailing to the penny how much money was made and paid, by the likes of Julius N. Rosenwald of Sears Roebuck and the oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller, citing by name federal tax officials as the sources.
But thanks to a feud between two of the richest men in America and the Teapot Dome scandal tax information became secret. And no one gains more from tax secrecy that the those among the superrich who steal from the rest of us by not paying what they owe.
Unless they are too brazen or clumsy, very rich tax cheats with very good lawyers get to deal with their tax offenses behind closed doors. As a criminal tax defense lawyer once told me, “I get paid to save people from indictments for their tax crimes by settling cases before their names go into the public record.”
https://www.dcreport.org/2019/04/15/trumps-man-on-the-inside-at-the-irs/
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Another thing worth mentioning: the subject of the article is Charles Rettig.
You might think that a former IRS executive or a prosecutor with experience in tax cases or a state tax administrator or another person whose job is to look out for the interests of the taxpayers generally, not individual taxpayers, would be a logical choice. Not in Trumpland.
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The 1924 anti-corruption law was used to get President Richard Nixon’s 1969 tax return. The IRS had audited it and found nothing amiss. But when Congress exercised its anti-corruption power and broke through the secrecy it emerged that Nixon was a major league tax criminal. He took fraudulent deductions valued in today’s money at more than $3.4 million.
