Sen. Ron Wyden wants IRS to explain lack of Epstein audits

Published 2:36 pm Thursday, July 31, 2025

Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon answers questions at a 2023 town hall in Beaverton. Wyden was the only Democrat in the Senate to vote “no” on a bill designed to protect children online. (Jaime Valdez, Beaverton Valley Times)

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden is pressing the Internal Revenue Service to explain why it apparently never audited the tax and estate planning work of disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, despite the financier’s lack of credentials and the extraordinary sums of money billionaires paid him.

Epstein, who died in a federal prison in 2019, has been the subject of intense media scrutiny over the past several weeks, as the White House has tried to downplay previous claims about a so-called list of famous and wealthy clients Epstein allegedly trafficked women and girls to, as well as his close personal ties to President Donald Trump.

In a letter sent Thursday to IRS Commissioner Billy Long, Wyden, the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, laid out findings from a yearslong investigation into Epstein’s financial dealings — and raised serious concerns about what he called “a failure of basic oversight.”

“Epstein lacked any professional training or certifications in accounting or tax law, yet was chosen by very wealthy people to execute very complex tax-related financial transactions,” Wyden wrote to Long. “Despite this glaring lack of qualifications that might lead anyone to double check Epstein’s work, it appears that the IRS failed over the course of many years to audit major tax transactions involving Epstein. It is unthinkable that transactions amounting to tens of millions of dollars paid to a known criminal for the purpose of helping a mega-wealthy individual dodge billions in taxes were never audited or investigated.”

The letter focuses heavily on the relationship between Epstein and Leon Black, the co-founder of Apollo Global Management, who paid Epstein more than $158 million between 2012 and 2017 for his purported help with a complicated estate tax issue, according to Wyden. Much of that work, Wyden said, was undocumented, loosely defined, and may not have even originated with Epstein.

Wyden has been investigating Epstein’s ties to Black for the past three years. According to a recent profile on Wyden’s investigation in the New York Times, Black’s legal team said he did nothing wrong paying Epstein for his work.

According to Wyden’s investigation, Black made the majority of his payments — nearly $100 million — to Epstein without a contract or written agreement. Wyden questioned why a billionaire would pay so much for services from someone with no credentials and a well-documented criminal past. According to Wyden, Epstein was paid amounts that far exceeded what Black paid other professional advisors involved in his tax and estate planning.

“I can’t help but question whether this case was legitimate tax planning, or if Black felt obligated to make these payments to Epstein for unstated reasons,” Wyden wrote.

Black has previously said that Epstein’s work helped him avoid more than $1 billion in estate taxes, though his attorneys later downplayed Epstein’s role in specific transactions. In one instance, Wyden said, Epstein was paid $20 million for a tax strategy that Black’s lawyers claimed had been developed by other advisors and was “in the public domain.” They also noted that Epstein’s advice was often “not useful” and was “vetted consistently” by Black’s legal and financial team, Wyden said.

Wyden argued that such a pattern — high compensation with limited demonstrable value — should have drawn scrutiny from the IRS. He also highlighted broader concerns about shrinking enforcement capacity at the agency, particularly under the Trump administration, which oversaw significant cuts to IRS enforcement staff, including specialized agents trained to audit high-net-worth individuals.

Wyden has called for a full accounting of any IRS audits or investigations into Epstein’s tax planning work, as well as an analysis of whether the fees Epstein collected were proportionate to the value of the services he provided. Wyden also wants to know whether any of those funds, which have been linked in other investigations to Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, were ever examined by the IRS or its criminal investigation unit.

“When Americans think the system is rigged, this is the kind of abuse they think about,” Wyden wrote. “While average Americans are regularly audited, it appears that the IRS will simply look the other way in cases involving billionaires.”

Wyden’s latest demands come amid a broader effort by lawmakers and journalists to trace the financial underpinnings of Epstein’s network — including how he used his connections with powerful clients to amass and spend enormous sums of money over two decades. While some of those findings have been made public, many remain behind closed doors due to the sensitive nature of bank records and ongoing legal proceedings.

Wyden’s letter to the IRS builds on findings his office released earlier this year, when he referred evidence to the Justice Department, Treasury, and FBI indicating that Black’s payments to Epstein were used to fund Epstein’s criminal operations. That referral also highlighted a $62 million settlement Black reached with the U.S. Virgin Islands, which granted him criminal immunity and acknowledged that the money he paid Epstein helped support Epstein’s activities there. Wyden’s staff also uncovered that a major U.S. bank waited seven years to report the payments to federal authorities, raising concerns of potential violations of money laundering laws.

Wyden asked the IRS to respond by Sept. 1.