Some tax experts say Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin may be overstepping his authority by getting involved in the administration's response to a congressional request for the president’s tax return information.
"As both a policy and legal matter, Mnuchin should not be involved," said Steven Rosenthal, a tax lawyer and senior fellow in the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
"Evidently the secretary hasn’t read the code he was citing, because the code delegates all these authorities to the IRS," Rizek said. In responding to House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Richard Neal's request, Mnuchin said there are constitutional concerns at play. But Rizek and Rosenthal said they see no constitutional issue with Neal’s request, which he made under the authority granted to him under law as the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee.
"If the Ways and Means Committee cannot ask questions about whether the IRS is properly administering tax laws, what oversight could they ever exercise?" he asked rhetorically. "The oversight and investigations of Congress stems from its legislative authority and there’s a couple of centuries of precedent here."
Rizek says, as a legal matter, whether Neal has political motivations is not of consequence because his stated oversight pursuits are sound.
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