“This weekend, The New York Times published the tax returns that Donald Trump had filed with New York, New Jersey and Connecticut where the Republican candidate for president claimed nearly a billion dollar business loss for that year. Although the Times said the experts it had consulted did not believe the records suggested anything improper, the sheer size of the complex $916 million business loss accents the serious enforcement difficulties TRAC described in a March report about the impact of the Congress’s recent sharp cutbacks in the Internal Revenue Service’s audit staff. http://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/latest/416/ – The TRAC report found the number of revenue agents available to audit wealthy individuals and complex business returns had been cut by 27 percent between FY 2010 and FY 2015. Time spent auditing larger corporations – with $250 million in assets – had dropped by more than one third over the same period. Furthermore, losses in under-reported taxes uncovered by the declining number of agents in those years had dropped by almost two thirds. TRAC’s March report on the IRS was the latest in a series of such studies going back to 1997 posted at: http://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/ The New York Times article on Donald Trump’s tax records is found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html“