In less than 24 hours since the New York Times revealed suspicious IRS audits of former FBI Director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe, the inspector general has announced an investigation, CNBC reported.
The New York Times revealed Wednesday that the worst and most intense audits that the IRS can conduct were done on two men who became foes of former President Donald Trump. The Times did an additional analysis on Thursday working through the statistics of the chances of these kinds of audits. The IRS hasn't been doing many audits over the past several years as funding has been drastically cut for the government branch responsible for ensuring revenue is coming in to support the United States.
"Among tax lawyers, the most invasive type of random audit carried out by the I.R.S. is known, only partly jokingly, as 'an autopsy without the benefit of death,'" said the report.
Annually, the invasive audit is only done on a few thousand Americans. The chance that it would be done on two of Trump's perceived enemies is 1 to 82 million. To put that in context, the chance of winning a state version of the lottery is 1 in 42 million.
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Donald Trump's appointee, Charles Rettig, has chaired the IRS since 2018.
"For all returns filed for tax years 2011 through 2019, the IRS examined 0.55 percent of individual returns filed, the agency said in its data book published in September," CNBC wrote.
CNN reported that Rettig reached out to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration for review.
The IRS maintains that the audits weren't politically motivated.
