"The appropriate response of the treasury secretary is very clear: Under a long-standing delegation order, the secretary does not get involved in taxpayer-specific matters and has delegated to the IRS commissioner as follows: 'The Commissioner of Internal Revenue shall be responsible for the administration and enforcement of the Internal Revenue laws,'" Summers, who served under President Bill Clinton, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed published Monday.
Summers, a Harvard professor who also served as an economic adviser to President Barack Obama, said that the delegation is not "readily revocable" and Mnuchin, under law, would have to notify the relevant committees if he plans not to delegate this issue to the IRS chief.
"So for the secretary to seek to decide whether to pass on the President's tax return to Congress would surely be inappropriate and probably illegal," Summers added.
He argued that neither he nor previous Treasury secretaries would have "interfered with the IRS to contravene a nearly century-old statute that had been applied on many previous occasions."
Summers also called Trump's claim that he cannot turn over his returns because they're under IRS audit "wholly fictitious," saying there's no such IRS rule or practice.
Using a provision in the tax code, the House Ways and Means Committee last week requested six years of Trump's business and personal tax returns from the IRS which is overseen by the Treasury Department.
The Trump administration has until Wednesday to respond to the committee's request, but the President has already made clear that he has no plans to make this fight easy.
Trump's lawyers sent a letter on Friday to the Treasury Department's general counsel dismissing the request as a politically motivated pursuit.
Last month, Mnuchin told House lawmakers he would "comply with the law" if he received a written request from Congress to turn over Trump's tax returns, but also sidestepped the issue by suggesting the decision would ultimately fall to the IRS commissioner, the country's federal tax collector.
Mnuchin was scheduled to appear at two back-to-back Capitol Hill hearings on Tuesday, his first appearance since Democrats formally requested Trump's tax returns.
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