IRS-CI chief likens tax law enforcement unit’s recent successes to takedown of Al Capone

The holiday most associated with Al Capone is Valentine’s Day, but the Internal Revenue Service’s top law enforcement officer has invoked the legendary gangster in this most festive of seasons.

“FY24 was one for the history books. For years, IRS-CI has been known as the agency that took down Al Capone, but this year, our cases hold their own place in U.S. history,” said IRS-CI Chief Guy Ficco in announcing the release of IRS Criminal Investigation’s (IRS CI’s) latest fiscal year (FY) report on Thursday, Dec. 5.

“As with Al Capone, financial trails eventually lead to criminals’ downfall,” said Ficco. “Our agents are the best at following the money trail, and that’s why they have an integral role in bringing down criminals ranging from national security threats to drug traffickers.”

Highlights of the unit’s investigation statistics from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024, included several tax agency firsts —

• The first sentencings tied to syndicated conservation easement schemes,
• The first indictment and guilty plea of a U.S. taxpayer solely for not paying taxes on gains from cryptocurrency sales,
• The first time Treasury agencies have led a task force and public outreach series to combat fentanyl trafficking, and
• An historic financial settlement by the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange for violating anti-money laundering and sanctions laws.

Those accomplishments are just part of job of the IRS’ law enforcement arm. And while crimes have become more sophisticated since the IRS took down Scarface, the IRS-CI basic job remains the same.

It is responsible for conducting financial crime investigations in areas involving tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, public corruption, health care fraud, and identity theft.

Increased investigations and recovered tax dollars: The fiscal year 2024 numbers themselves also are impressive.

During that time frame, IRS CI initiated more than 2,667 criminal investigations, obtained 1,571 convictions, and reclaimed its 90 percent conviction rate.

  
So are the dollar amounts.

The agency’s investigative work identified more than $9.1 billion in fraud from tax and financial crimes, obtained court orders totaling $1.7 billion in restitution to the IRS, and seized criminal assets totaling approximately $1.2 billion.

Expanded international partnerships: While IRS-CI focuses on violations of U.S. tax law, it’s well aware that crime, like much everything else, has gone global.

So in FY24, the criminal investigative unit expanded its work with international partners.

The efforts included —

• Extending the agency’s international footprint by launching a new attaché post in Nassau, Bahamas, and a cyber attaché post in Singapore. They are part of IRS-CI’s 14 attaché offices abroad.
• Providing more than 30 sessions by its International Training Team to more than 930 participants from more than 70 countries. These training sessions help create and strengthen IRS-CI’s global partnerships and investigations.
• Initiating 111 new cybercrime investigations in FY24 alone, as the agency continued to focus on this growing tax, and crime, area. Defendants in the cases received prison sentences averaging more than five years.

Domestically, IRS-CI has 20 field offices across the United States.

The report, officially IRS Publication 3583, provides case examples for each of the offices, as well as additional statistics about the agency’s work and details about specialized IRS-CI services.

Tax Felon Friday: While associating one of country’s most-wanted criminals with any holiday is a bit disconcerting, the release this Christmas season month of the IRS-CI annual report underscores the reality that tax crooks never take a holiday.

That’s one reason this past week (Dec. 2-6) the IRS and its Security Summit partners held their 9th annual National Tax Security Awareness Week. The yearly event emphasizes the importance of protecting sensitive financial information from identity theft and tax scams, especially as the holidays and the upcoming tax season approach.

And those IRS and Security Summit efforts, as well as all the tax criminals caught and prosecuted thanks to IRS-CI agents’ hard work all qualify as this week’s Tax Felon Friday entry.

If you want to catch up on all sorts of tax miscreants, the ol' blogs' special Tax Felon Friday page is a good place to start.

And if you want more tax crime posts, notably those that were published long before I gave them a special end-of-week feature, you can peruse, what else, the tax crimes category. You'll find this post at the top of that collection right now, so just scroll down for more.

You also might find these items of interest:

• IRS CI chief discusses his priorities & goals for the division
• IRS investigators identify $37 billion in tax & financial crimes (Dec. 8, 2023)
• 'Bitcoin Jesus' accused of $48 million in tax evasion related to the crypto currency
• Crypto fraud, international scheming, greedy families: All are in IRS CI's top 10 tax crime cases of 2023

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