Donald Trump said during Thursday’s debate that he couldn’t release his tax returns because he was being audited. | AP Photo IRS chief: 'Rare' for taxpayer to be audited several years in a row, as Trump claims

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said Friday that it would be unlikely for a taxpayer to be audited for multiple years in a row, a day after Donald Trump maintained the agency had audited him a dozen years running.

Koskinen, in an interview with C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers,” stressed repeatedly that he couldn’t comment directly on Trump’s personal tax situation. But the IRS chief also strongly suggested that the scenario Trump laid out in Thursday’s GOP debate was improbable.


“It would be rare for anyone to be audited every year,” Koskinen said in the interview, which will air Sunday. If there were no issues following an audit, Koskinen added, “it’s a number of years — two or three at least — before you hear from us again."

Trump said during Thursday’s debate that he couldn’t release his tax returns because he was being audited, and that “I’ve been audited every year. Twelve years or something like that.” Following the debate, Trump added in a CNN interview that the IRS might be auditing him because he’s a "strong Christian.”

But while it might be smart legal and political maneuvering for Trump to keep his returns bottled up while he’s being audited, Koskinen said the IRS doesn’t care one way or another if a taxpayer releases his or her own documents.

“We stress that we’re in tax administration, so we have no stake in any of the primaries going on,” he said. “From our standpoint, if you’re being audited, and you want to do something else, share that information with your returns, you can do that.”

About 10 percent of those earning more than $1 million were audited in 2015, according to IRS statistics released last week. By comparison, less than 1 percent of those earning less than $200,000 were audited.

While companies can be subject to annual auditing by the IRS, it is extremely rare for that to happen to individual taxpayers, said Dave Kautter, a tax lawyer at the accounting firm RSM.

“If you’re audited ever year, the IRS is going to have a reason for it, and it could be one of a whole bunch of reasons,” he said.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean that you were taking aggressive tax positions — it could — but it doesn’t necessarily,” Kautter said.

“It could be that your return is just so darn complex that they think you must have made a mistake,” he said. “Another could be they did find an error in a prior year, and that’s a reason to keep coming back.”

It’s also possible that the details of the return are hitting the agency’s tripwires designed to single out returns for possible audit.

Because tax returns are private, said Kautter, “it’s impossible to know why he’s being audited unless he says so.”

As for Trump’s claim that his faith could be a factor in his audits, Koskinen said: “It’s about something in your tax return.”

“It would never be a case that you would be audited because of any religious persuasion you might have,” he added.