Sorry, I am informed that my previous reply was truncated to one word only.
What I meant to post:
No.
As George Yin puts it:
A committee disclosure [of someone’s tax returns] must be for a legitimate committee purpose. [Because] public disclosure of confidential information is more violative of privacy rights than the mere seizure of the same information by Congress, Congress’s right to disclose must be subject at a minimum to the same implicit condition applicable to its investigative power.
Yin is a professor of law and taxation at the University of Virginia and a former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation.
He is also the author of a relevant paper, ‘‘Preventing Congressional Violations of Taxpayer Privacy,’’ 69 The Tax Lawyer 103, 154-160 (2015). Here is the first paragraph of the paper:
This Article claims that the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee violated the law in 2014 when it voted (strictly along party lines) to release to the public the tax return information of 51 taxpayers. The Committee acted under the belief that an obscure tax law provision authorized its action. But the provision required the Committee to have a legitimate purpose for the disclosures, and – incredibly – it failed to satisfy this almost trivial, common-sense restriction.
So, in case you were wondering, Yin is not an excuser of Republican shenanigans.
Anyway, what all this boils down to is what I said in the first place:
The relevant statute does not give Neal the right to unilaterally read anyone’s tax returns into the public record.
To release someone’s private records, Neal would first have to establish a legitimate purpose. (Which is not to say that he wouldn’t be able to.)