Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-21-2017
Abstract
This study examines how Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (CI) Special Agents select cases to investigate during a period of stagnant budgets and significant personnel attrition. Semi-structured interviews (N=30) of current and retired agents and supervisors, along with information gleaned from published reports and through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, suggests that special agents did not believe that the 13% reduction of IRS-CI's appropriated funding from 2010 to 2016 impeded their ability to select and investigate the best tax and money laundering cases, even though the funding gap resulted in a 19% reduction in special agents. However, the data also suggests that many cases worthy of investigation were not selected due to the lack of personnel. Factors influencing cases selection included the avoidance of paperwork burden inherit to legal income source (Tax Gap) cases, the desire to work multi-agency grand jury cases, management priorities, and a desire on behalf of many agents to work cases with an identifiable victim. It also appears that the potential for asset forfeiture funds may also influenced case selection. Tax administrators and lawmakers may benefit from this new insight into the factors involving case selection as they continue to try to close the $458 billion annual Tax Gap.
Keywords
taxation, internal revenue, Weatherhead School of Management, internal revenue service, criminal investigation, taxes, special agent, enforcement
Rights
© The Author(s). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Department/Center
Design & Innovation
Recommended Citation
Warren, Robert A., "Factors Influencing the Case Selection of IRS Special Agents" (2017). Student Scholarship. 215.
https://commons.case.edu/studentworks/215