WASHINGTON— The IRS's law enforcement division has introduced a new program to provide financial institutions with measurable insights into how the agency utilizes suspicious activity reports in federal crime investigations, ABA Banking Journal said.
Under the CI-FIRST initiative, IRS Criminal Investigation headquarters will collaborate with major financial institutions with national and international reach, while field office personnel will engage with regional and community banks and credit unions within their jurisdictions, according to an agency statement. Additionally, IRS-CI will streamline subpoena requests and provide financial institutions with guidance on optimizing Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) for maximum effectiveness, ABA Banking Journal said.
ABA Banking Journal added that IRS-CI also released figures on how it uses Bank Secrecy Act data: More than 87% of the criminal investigations recommended for prosecution by IRS-CI from fiscal years 2022 to 2024 had a primary subject with a related BSA filing, with adjudicated cases resulting in a 97.3% conviction rate. Defendants received an average prison sentence of 37 months. IRS-CI used the data to identify $21.1 billion in fraud tied to tax and financial crimes, seize $8.2 billion in assets tied to criminal activity and obtain $1.4 billion in restitution for crime victims. Nearly 1,600 cases IRS-CI opened last year has at least one currency transaction report on the primary subject. More than 67% of cases opened by IRS-CI had a subject with one or more CTRs below $40,000, with 50% of CTRs involving amounts less than $22,230.
IRS-CI added that since 2020, it has used BSA data to initiate nearly 1,300 investigations with ties to fentanyl and investigate alleged employee retention credit fraud totaling $5.5 billion, ABA Banking Journal noted.