IRS Crime Fighting ARM announces the modernization program as financial offenses use more technologies

Washington (AP) – as nature financial crime Changes, with technology and you are used to perpetuating illegal acts, IRS Criminal Investigation Arm – announces a new program intended to improve how it interacts with financial institutions.

Called feedback in response to strategic threat-or-forst-programs revealed on Friday is intended to accelerate citation applications, to offer better data on how to detect criminal activity and to build investigations faster and more efficient.

Under The law on bank secretBanks and financial institutions must send a variety of suspicious activity reports to the federal government, after detecting potential money laundering or terrorist financing.

The purpose for the first CI is to help financial institutions to detect and report more easily the financial offenses related to fentanyl trafficking, drug trafficking, human smuggling and other offenses-through the efficiency of summons and improvement of data with banks. Guy Ficco, the head of the IRS-CI, said in a statement that “Public-Private Partnerships prosper when everyone benefits each other.”

Also on Friday, IRS Criminal Investigation has launched new statistics that highlight how the agency has investigated financial offenses using data on bank secret law.

The agency found $ 21.1 billion in fraud related to tax and financial crimes from 2022 to 2024, confiscated $ 8.2 billion in assets related to criminal activity during the same period and recovered $ 1.4 billion in the return of crime victims, according to the Agency.

“Behind all these values ​​are real crimes with real victims,” ​​said Lauren Kohr, the strategic IRS-CI involvement counselor. “Often people look at the BSA data or the secret of the bank as a regulatory requirement, but it is indeed one of the sharpest law enforcement tools, they must follow the wrongful money and dismantle these criminal networks.”

“And when the money is moving, these BSA reports are,” she said “who tells us the story.”

Special IRS-CI agents performed 966,900 searches annually to foreign exchange reports. A currency transaction report, or CTR, is a financial document that banks have to deposit with treasury for any cash transaction that exceeds $ 10,000 in a single day.

In the last three years, about 67% of the IRS-CI cases have involved one or more currency transaction reports below $ 40,000, half of the currency transaction reports involving amounts less than $ 22,230.

Despite most of the reports that come under $ 40,000, a group of Republican MPs aims to increase the threshold.

The representative of Georgia, Barry Loudermilk and nine other home Republicans, sponsored a draft law called the Law on the modernization of the financial reporting threshold, which would raise the reporting of foreign exchange transactions and the suspicious activity of reporting the thresholds to 30,000 and 10,000 USD, respectively, and to index the CTR threshold for inflation every five years.

On April 1, Subcommittee for Financial Services of the House for National Security, Illicit Finance and International Financial Institutions Will organize a hearing On April 1 and the problem of CTR thresholds will arise.

Last December, a report by the Government’s repayment office recommended the help of the treasury to “reduce the number of CTRs deposited that are not used by law enforcement, such as by increasing the reporting threshold or extending criteria to allow additional exemptions. “

In addition to their activity of financial crimes, the IRS administration was called by the Trump administration to help apply immigration.

Last month, Kristi Noem Kristian Security Secretary submitted a request to the secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent to borrow IRS criminal investigation workers To help the repression of immigration, according to a letter obtained by Associated Press. It cites the IRS impulse in financing, through the infusion of funds of $ 80 billion that the Federal Agency for Collecting Tax Collect under the Law to reduce the inflation of Democrats has already been crouched back.