Don't Mess With Taxes

I hope you’re having a great long July 4th holiday break. I’m catching up on some podcasts, and one is a good fit for this week's Tax Felon Friday feature.

Guy Ficco, who took over as head of the IRS Criminal Investigation division in April, spoke with Bloomberg Tax reporter Erin Slowey in the latest edition of Talking Tax podcast.

Ficco has spent his 29-year IRS career as part of CI, so he’s seen firsthand how the tax investigative component has changed over the years.

Changing times: Some things have evolved for everyone in every job. Many can relate to some of Ficco’s memories of IRS CI in 1995, like no cell phones, just a beeper, and no laptops.

Specific to the IRS, the agency didn’t have to worry about virtual currency, which didn’t exist yet. And IRS CI had few international cases.

As the sophistication of financial transactions — and associated financial fraud — have advanced, the Internal Revenue Service has adjusted.

Currently, said Ficco, about 15 percent of CI’s new investigations are prompted by Banking Secrecy Act (BSA) issues. And in addition to dealing with crypto concerns, the Internal Revenue Service also works with new partners, including international investigators.

Historic goals remain: But what hasn’t changed, Ficco told Bloomberg Tax, is the unit’s bread-and-butter focus.

“We're the only agency that can investigate federal income tax violations, and we’re the only large agency that spends 100 percent of its time on financial fraud investigations,” he said. So, those always are going to be priorities.

One area Ficco does want to improve is IRS CI’s head count. IRS CI currently is operating at around just 60 percent of its staffing three decades ago. Meanwhile, tax complexity and tax crimes have increased.

Ficco said the added Inflation Reduction Act funds should help with hiring so that IRS CI can better deal with its challenges.

You can read more about, and find a link to listen to, Ficco’s conversation with Slowey at the Bloomberg Tax story on the exchange. You also can click the blue-and-white arrow on the upper left of the player embedded below. For your scheduling purposes, it runs for just more than 21 minutes. 

Tax Felon Friday: Check back here at the end of each work week for Tax Felon Friday reports on criminals collared by IRS CI, as well as other tax-crime related items.

In the meantime, 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 can go directly to the IRS CI web page for the news on its latest arrests and prosecutorial successes in fighting tax crimes.

You also might find these items of interest:

• Guy Ficco will become new IRS CI chief on April 1
• GOP presidential candidate found guilty of federal tax fraud
• Personal assistant heading to jail for $2.7 million in embezzlement and tax evasion
• IRS Whistleblower Office awards more than doubled in FY23, but it still faces substantial backlog

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