Nearly a century ago, the IRS’ criminal investigators built the case that landed Al Capone behind bars for tax evasion.
This year the IRS Criminal Investigation division, charged with probing tax crimes, branched out to help ICE arrest migrants and deployed to Washington and Memphis, Tennessee, as part of President Trump’s tough-on-crime surge.
And it’s doing it all with fewer personnel — about 100 fewer special agents and 230 fewer staff, according to the latest annual report from IRS-CI, as the division is known.
Guy Ficco, the division’s chief, said in the report that the new missions have been “resource intensive” and showcase his people’s ability to adapt.
“While such missions extend beyond traditional tax enforcement, they demonstrate the adaptability of our agents and the broad value we bring to interagency efforts,” he said in the report, released late last week.
The cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement began in May, when IRS-CI dedicated some of its agents to help arrest, process, detain and deport illegal immigrants. Officials said the IRS agents focused on members of transnational gangs and helped locate migrant kids separated from their families.
Some 190 agents were assigned to assist Homeland Security’s efforts.
The agency also reached a deal to share access to some IRS data with Homeland Security, which said it wanted to get addresses so it could track down deportation targets. A federal judge last month ordered the IRS to stop sharing the data, saying the request likely broke the law.
Overall, IRS-CI spent 63.3% of its time on tax investigations in 2025, down from about 70% the past two years. Narcotics work accounted for 11% in all three years.
The real growth was in other nontax investigations, which rose from 17.6% of casework time in fiscal 2024 to 23.7% this year.
Agents identified $4.5 billion in tax fraud and $6.1 billion in other financial crimes, referred more than 2,000 cases for prosecution and tallied an 89% conviction rate for cases that concluded.
Cybercrimes continued to grow, with IRS-CI saying it seized 2.35 petabytes of data in fiscal 2025, up nearly 60% from the year before.
Mr. Ficco said the agency battled government program fraud and probed those who would try to evade U.S. financial sanctions.
“Our work plays an integral role in shutting down criminal networks that try to exploit government programs and launder funds,” he said.
IRS-CI made headlines in the Biden administration after two agents became whistleblowers, testifying to Congress that their investigation into Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was derailed by what appeared to be political influence.
Their testimony helped squelch a defendant-friendly plea deal and led to a subsequent guilty plea on tax evasion charges and a jury conviction on firearms charges. He was then pardoned by his father.
There were no such headlines this year, but IRS-CI said it saw some key numbers rise.
That included total investigations initiated, which rose from 2,667 in fiscal 2024 to 2,792 in fiscal 2025. Within that, investigations for corporate fraud, identity theft, money laundering and financial institution fraud climbed.
Cases for abusive tax schemes, public corruption, terrorism and narcotics slid.
Overall prosecution recommendations surged from 1,794 to 2,043.
Among the specific cases IRS-CI highlighted was a role in investigating the Feeding our Future fraud, which bilked more than $300 million from the government for a pandemic meals program in Minnesota and has resulted in charges against at least 78 people.
The IRS said it helped reel in Abdiaziz Shafi Farah, who falsely claimed to have served 18 million meals — and collected government reimbursement for them.
IRS-CI also helped take down a “laptop farm” that fooled U.S. companies into thinking they were hiring Americans when in fact the IT jobs were being farmed out to North Korea. Investigators said Christina Chapman, convicted in the scam, falsely reported wages in the names of U.S. workers whose identities she stole to get the work.
