In a press call on August 2, 2017, the Chief of the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Criminal Investigation Division (CID), John D. Fort, announced two new enforcement initiatives: a National Coordinated Investigations Unit and an International Tax Enforcement Group.

The National Coordinated Investigations Unit is intended to be, in Fort’s words, a “cutting edge” group answering directly to CID’s management. It is intended to harness data already being gathered by the IRS’s civil departments to identify areas of non-compliance, so that major investigations can be coordinated at a national level.

The first three areas of inquiry for the new unit will be international tax enforcement, employment tax enforcement and microcap stock fraud (an effort that will be coordinated with the Security and Exchange Commission). In Fort’s words, these efforts will generate “must-work referrals that come out of this group to the field offices.” International tax and employment tax enforcement are already longstanding CID priorities, so it will be interesting to see how CID’s use of data analytics will further those goals and whether greater coordination at the national level will result. (more…)