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Last week we learned about a couple of highly invasive tax audits authorized by the Internal Revenue Service for ex-FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, both of whom were frequent targets of ex-President Donald Trump.
The report raises serious questions about whether Trump, or someone at the IRS acting on his behalf, pushed officials to investigate the two men as revenge for their refusal to drop investigations into his campaign or to help him find dirt on political opponents.
If those allegations bear out, it should surprise no one — especially James Comey.
If those allegations bear out, it should surprise no one — especially James Comey. Last week (a day before The New York Times first reported the IRS details) I wrote about how Comey’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign helped Trump, and trained him to expect officials in the Justice Department to serve him corruptly. It's very possible those expectations reached the IRS, as well.
But as we talk about the misuse of the IRS, an agency that’s essential for our democracy to function, we need to remember Comey and McCabe — two wealthy white guys — do not symbolize the typical IRS victim. Instead, and for decades, the IRS has been known to disproportionately target nonwhite people and poor people.
As law professor and tax expert Dorothy Brown wrote for The Atlantic last summer, “rich, white Americans tend to get tax rules designed for their benefit.” And those benefits often also extend to white people — like Comey and McCabe — who may not be rich but are still well-to-do.
Brown highlighted how the IRS was auditing Black people who received the earned income tax credit at a higher rate than white people who received the same benefit:
[W]hile almost half of all EITC-eligible filers are white, an analysis by ProPublica found that the counties with the highest audit rates were “poor, rural, mostly African American and in the South.” Predominantly Black counties have higher audit rates than predominantly white ones because of the large number of EITC claimants living there.
She also provided an unvarnished assessment as to why the IRS tends to target marginalized people:
The IRS argues that EITC claimants are audited frequently because the audits are cheap to conduct, can be done by mail, and do not require a lot of IRS personnel time. Audits of wealthy taxpayers, by comparison, involve hand-to-hand combat with the best lawyers the wealthy can buy. It is simply easier for the IRS to go after the most vulnerable among us.
I’m not sharing these facts to downplay the seriousness of what Comey and McCabe seem to have experienced. We can and should sympathize with these two men of relative privilege for facing needlessly invasive and seemingly unfair audits, but the sympathy shouldn’t end with them. It should extend to the people and communities that have suffered this treatment for decades, without front-page headlines.