The New York Times Michael S. Schmidt published a story yesterday revealing that both Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe were audited by the IRS — during the time when a Trump appointee was the IRS commissioner. Neither man was aware that the other was the subject of an audit until they were informed by the NYT. The type of audit the two former FBI Directores were subjected to is supposed to be random, but that odds of that are astronomical. www.nytimes.com/…
In a previous iteration of this story I did some simple calculations that proved to incorrect. I suggested that if James Comey had a 1 / 30,600 of being audited and Andrew McCabe had a 1 / 19, 250 chance that the odds of those two events occurring could be calculated by multiplying the odds of the first event 1/ 36,000 by the odds of the second 1 / 19,250 which yields a very large number 1 out of 589,050,000, which seemed rather improbable to me. By way of comparison the odds of winning Powerball are 1 in 292,201,338. For that assessment, I followed the procedure found here. www.statisticshowto.com/… and that simple calculation misstates the actual problem.
The NYT was helpful today and published a companion story calculating the odds in a different and more accurate way. www.nytimes.com/… Depending on what population is considered — the statisticians calculate the odds of both men being audited at less astronomical but still rather improbable 1 in 82,072,872 or .00000121834%
The odds that both men were randomly selected for audit is roughly equivalent to the odds of flipping a coin and having it come up heads 19 times in a row www.omnicalculator.com/.... That could happen, but when it happens to people with whom TFG holds a grudge, we should pay attention and look a little deeper.
Here are some highlights from Schmidt’s NYT story.
The odds of being selected for that audit in any given year are tiny — out of nearly 153 million individual returns filed for 2017, for example, the I.R.S. targeted about 5,000, or roughly one out of 30,600.
The audit of the Comeys began in November 2019. The audit of the McCabes started in October 2021, nine months after Mr. Trump left office. At the time both audits occurred, the I.R.S. was run by Mr. Rettig, whom Mr. Biden has allowed to stay on for a term set to expire in November.
During the 2016 election, Mr. Rettig, a Los Angeles-based tax lawyer, said that because Mr. Trump was under audit, he should “absolutely not” release his tax returns.
“When something like that happens, the president’s involvement inevitably casts a shadow over an otherwise routine government function and harms the public’s confidence in the fair administration of taxes,” said Scott D. Michel, a longtime lawyer who specializes in tax disputes.
Trump says he knows nothing about it.
Thursday, Jul 7, 2022 · 7:14:13 PM +00:00 · ARodinFan
www.nytimes.com/… On July 7 following the NYT stories and statements from McCabe and Comey, the IRS commissioner has requested that the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration investigate the audits of James Comey and Andrew McCabe, presumably to determine whether they were proper and consistent with agency policy