Audits of two top former FBI officials who became political foes of former President Trump were not the result of any misconduct on the part of the IRS, according to a report released this week by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).
The TIGTA report found that the audit selection process in 2017 and 2019, which were the years that former FBI chief James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe received especially intense National Research Program (NRP) audits from the IRS, was random and carried out correctly.
“Our assessment of the original sample selection process concluded that the IRS randomly selected TYs [tax years] 2017 and 2019 tax returns for NRP audits,” the TIGTA report found.
TIGTA said that IRS computer programs “categorized returns in the correct strata” and “correctly selected tax returns for audit.” The IRS “did not include malicious code that would force the selection of taxpayers for an NRP audit.”
Democratic lawmakers who had suspected that the audits received by Comey and McCabe were political retribution for not backing off the investigation into former President Trump’s political ties with Russia expressed satisfaction with the inspector general’s report.
“The credibility and integrity of the IRS are foundational to the success of our tax administration, and this report alleviates some concerns,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said in a statement to…
