Not true. The IRS has an agenda, have you been in the dark? Acting like they are the good guys after what they did to the conservative PACs & Jewish organizations is just disingenuous.
IRS concentrate on audit high $ returns because that’s where the money is. They try and force you to use the tax calculation method that will net them the most $ even if there are other legal methods and the courts have found that you are entitled to use the method that generates the least tax. Its ridiculous to pretend that multiyear audits are not common. There is advice on how to manage them on every tax lawyer blog.
One example:
Multiyear Tax Audits – How to Try to Contain a Tax Audit
Unfortunately, sometimes during a tax audit you may have an overeager IRS, EDD, BOE, or FTB agent who is trying to find any issue they can with your tax return information in order to try to expand the audit. This is called “mushrooming” and it occurs when the audit for one or two years is expanded into a multi-year audit. While there is no way to definitively prevent an audit from mushrooming, there are ways to try to limit the audit from expanding.
Perhaps you expected me to roll over and play dead upon your presentation of totally irrelevant snippets of factoids. Your comments are based upon supposition of what you think you know about how the IRS works. My comments were made based upon 40 years experience, 14 within the IRS. The “lawyer’s blog” you excerpted mentions a technique frequently used by the IRS to avoid the very policy I mentioned. The auditor will ask the taxpayer to bring copies of their tax returns for several years before or after the current year being audited so they may look for potential audit issues without actually “selecting” those years for examination. This technique skirts the policy about successive audits. That policy doesn’t apply unless the tqx returns are formally selected. If the IRS finds additional tax on those returns they will formally select them because the policy doesn’t apply if they find irregularities.
I assume Trump hires competent tax lawyers (but maybe he doesn’t), who would—or should—know about the IRS tricks and could call the IRS’s bluff. Certainly you are correct the IRS audits the rich more often, but if the IRS doesn’t find anything three years in a row a competent attorney could make the IRS follow their own policy. If Trump is to be believed about consecutive audits it can only mean they are finding things that result in additional taxes. If Trump disputed such findings his lawyers would file a court case, which are public record. Since neither Trump nor anyone else has found such court cases leads me to call B.S. on Trump’s claim he can’t submit his tax returns until after the audit(s) are completed.