IRS Crime Fighting Arm announces the modernization program

By Fatima Hussein, Associated Press

Washington (AP) – As the nature of financial crime changes, with technology and AI increasingly used to perpetrate illegal acts, the criminal arm of IRS – IRS Criminal Investigation – announces a new program intended to improve the way in which he interacts with financial institutions.

Called comments in response to a strategic threat – or below – The program unveiled on Friday is intended to accelerate requests for assignment, to give banks better data on how to detect criminal activity and develop investigations more quickly and more efficiently.

Under the Bank Secrecy Act, banks and financial institutions are required to send a variety of suspicious activity reports to the federal government after detecting money laundering or terrorist funding.

The objective for below is to help financial institutions to detect and more easily report financial crimes linked to fentanyl traffic, drug trafficking, human smuggling and other crimes – by rationalizing requests for assignment and improving the sharing of data with banks. The head of the IRS-CI, Guy Ficco, said in a statement that “public-private partnerships thrive when everyone benefits mutually”.

Also Friday, the IRS Criminal Investigation published new statistics stressing how the agency investigated financial crimes using data from the Banque Secret Act.

The agency found that $ 21.1 billion in fraud linked to tax and financial crimes from 2022 to 2024, seized $ 8.2 billion in criminal activity in the same period and recovered $ 1.4 billion in return for crimes, the agency.

“Behind all these measures, there are real crimes with real victims,” ​​said Lauren Kohr, IRS-CI strategic committee. “Often people consider BSA data or the Secrecy Bank Secrecy as a regulatory requirement, but it is really one of the most sharp tools that the police as a whole must retrace illegal money and dismantle these criminal networks.”

“And when the illicit money moves, these BSA reports,” she said, “said the story.”

The special agents IRS-CI carried out an average of 966,900 searches per year against the currency transaction reports. A currency transaction report, or CTR, is a financial document that banks must file with the Treasury for any cash transaction exceeding $ 10,000 in a single day.

Over the past three years, around 67% of cases opened by IRSC have involved one or more transfer reports in foreign currency than $ 40,000, half of the currency transaction reports involving amounts less than $ 22,230.

Despite the majority of reports below $ 40,000, a group of republican legislators seek to increase the threshold.

The representative of Georgia Barry Loudermilk and nine other Républicains de la Chambre spoke a bill called the Financial Reporting Threshold Modernization Act, which would increase the report on currency transactions and the suspected activity reports at $ 30,000 and $ 10,000 respectively, and indexed the CTR threshold for inflation every five years.

On April 1, the subcommittee of the financial services of the Chamber on national security, illicit finance and international financial institutions will hold an audience on April 1 and the question of CTR thresholds will arise.

Last December, a report on the government’s responsibility office recommended that the Treasury help “reduce the number of CTRs filed which are not used by the police, for example by increasing the declaration threshold or expanding the criteria to allow other exemptions.”

In addition to their work as financial crimes, the IRS Criminal Investigations was called by the Trump administration to help the application of immigration.

Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sent a request to the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to borrow IRS workers in criminal investigation to help the repression of immigration, according to a letter obtained by the Associated Press. He cites the strengthening of the IRS in funding, thanks to the infusion of funds of $ 80 billion that the Federal Tax Collection Agency received under the Act on the Reduction of Democrats Inflation has already been recovered.

Originally published: March 28, 2025 at 10:31 PDT