Despite the great deal of chatter (marches even) about the need for President Trump to release his tax returns, there has been relatively little discussion of Congress’s statutory authority to obtain these materials. Two exceptions are these comments by Professors Andy Grewal and George Yin. Grewal and Yin agree that Congress has the authority to request and obtain Trump’s tax returns for a legitimate legislative purpose, and they also agree that the executive branch could disregard a congressional request for these returns on certain grounds (e.g., Congress does not in fact have a legitimate legislative need for the information or, in Grewal’s words, “the request is supported only by personal animus and not a proper legislative purpose”).
Though the matter is not free from doubt, I take a somewhat different view of the law here. I argue below that the Secretary of the Treasury (to whom Congress directs requests for tax return information) and the executive branch in general do not have the legal right to refuse congressional requests for tax return information based on an assessment of the legislative need or motive that underlies such requests. I also suggest that Congress can minimize the likelihood that the executive branch will assert a right to refuse its request by adopting a careful and disciplined approach to making the request in the first place.
Continue reading “(Not So) Desperately Seeking Trump’s Tax Returns”