Earlier this year, IRS Criminal Investigation (CI) got a new chief: Guy Ficco.
Ficco isn’t a stranger to the organization. He previously served as deputy chief. He was named to that post in 2022, having taken over from Jim Robnett, who retired after 36 years of IRS service. Before being appointed deputy chief, Ficco was the executive director of Global Operations Policy and Support at CI.
Ficco first joined the IRS in July 1995, right out of school (Dominican University of New York), where he earned a degree in Business Administration with a minor in accounting from Dominican University New York.
He had been the equivalent of a student co-op in the Manhattan District, New York Field Office, and became a special agent shortly after graduation. It was something of a family business at that point—his older sister was, at the time, a revenue officer. “I learned from her,” he says.
In addition, he notes that the IRS really aligned well with his skill set.
New York would be Ficco’s home for the next decade or so. He worked on several cases, including white-collar financial crimes in the city, narcotics cases, and the KPMG tax shelter fraud scandal. (KPMG LLP admitted criminal wrongdoing and agreed to pay $456 million in fines, restitution, and penalties as part of an agreement to defer prosecution of the firm—the firm admitted that it engaged in a fraud that generated at least $11 billion in phony tax losses which, according to court papers, cost the U.S. at least $2.5 billion in evaded taxes.)
Ficco tackles a number of different roles, including as a supervisory special agent and assistant special agent in charge in Washington, D.C. Eventually, he moved to the Philadelphia field office, where he was the special agent in charge (SAC)—the SAC is the highest-ranking criminal investigator in the region.
As part of his duties, Ficco ran the agency’s national undercover program for a year. In CI, the undercover program allows an investigator to assume a covert identity to gain evidence or information about the criminal activities under investigation. It’s a limited tool, only used when other investigative techniques cannot obtain information. According to the agency, undercover operations are used in less than 5% of cases—those tend to be investigations of illegal activities such as narcotics trafficking, money laundering, fraudulent tax return preparation, tax refund fraud, and the skimming of business profits.
Ficco also served for about a year as a deputy director in CI’s CIA strategy section, which was largely focused on the people in the organization (hiring and the like).
It seems he’s done it all. That’s been an advantage, he says, especially when gauging risks and strategizing about what comes next. The logical next step, it would seem, was for him to become deputy chief of CI in 2022 and eventually chief of the agency.
As chief, Ficco now oversees a global staff of about 3,350 employees, including 2,250 special agents. He says hiring is still a challenge. To give you a sense of how things have changed due to funding cuts, when Ficco started at the IRS in 1995, CI had about 3,500 special agents and nearly 5,000 employees.
His supervisory experience has given him critical perspective when it comes to employees, including the importance of mental health. It’s always a concern in the workplace, but coming out of the pandemic, making sure that people were supported and empowered was key. It’s not enough to talk about programs. Employees, he says, should be able to articulate, “I need help right now.”
CI is actively hiring—thanks in part to that Inflation Reduction Act money—but due to a combination of attrition and hiring freezes in past years, a significant percentage of field agents are now new. That is, Ficco says, “tremendously exciting and tremendously terrifying all at once.” He says they’ve had to be creative to make it work, including re-hiring former agents as contractors to fill holes, including serving as de facto instructors and mentors.
Ficco notes that the IRS has “never been particularly popular.” But, he says, misrepresentations about the IRS, including CI, and what they do—those stories about the 87,000 armed agents—have exacerbated less-than-fuzzy feelings about the agency. That’s something that they’ve had to work to correct through outreach and community recruiting, especially at colleges and universities. The best way to get their message across, he says, is to “just continue to do our job representing the American people.”
Funding—some of which comes from the asset forfeiture fund, a pool of money from assets seized from criminal activities and now managed by the Department of Justice—has also helped CI innovate with new technology. That will, he says, allow the agency to move forward.
Why does that matter? Enforcement is critical to ensuring that our tax system runs smoothly.
“The U.S. has a voluntary tax system,” Ficco says, “and the only way it works is if everyone is playing on an even field.”
“Let me explain it to you this way,” he says, offering an example. If the speed limit is 60 miles per hour on the highway, he offers, most drivers will go 60 miles per hour, but some will go 100 miles per hour. If the highway patrol pulls over those who are speeding, “the other drivers see that there’s accountability.” Importantly, he adds, “If you’re driving the right way, you are not the target.”
Those who aren’t following the rules? CI is currently focusing resources on tackling money laundering, Banking Secrecy Act violations, identity theft, and cyber-related crimes. The agency is also scrutinizing high-net-worth nonfilers and those who are otherwise noncompliant. Federal income tax violations, he notes, are CI’s “bread and butter.”
Recently, CI has also sharpened its focus on stopping scams, including improper Employee Retention Credit (ERC) claims. Putting an end to those schemes are near and dear to Ficco’s heart—unfortunately, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has also opened up additional opportunities for scammers to devise schemes to defraud people.
That is, he explains, what CI is supposed to be doing—fighting crime, protecting taxpayers, and preserving the integrity of the tax system. That mission, he says, is as important as any. But the good stuff sometimes gets overlooked—an oversight the agency hopes to correct. Ficco emphasizes that CI is hoping to promote more of the work the agency is doing, citing LinkedIn as an example of how they are sharing CI’s stories. He also singled out Justin Cole as instrumental in that work—Ficco says that Cole has been working to build out the agency’s media division, including social media.
You can hear how passionate Ficco is about the agency—it’s been his life’s work for 29 years. Today, CI is the sixth-largest law enforcement agency in the U.S. and is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations like tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, and identity theft. While other federal agencies also have investigative jurisdiction for money laundering and some bank secrecy act violations, the IRS is the only federal agency that can investigate potential criminal violations of the tax code.
The agency has 20 field offices located across the U.S. and 12 attaché posts abroad.
You can find IRS CI on X (formerly known as Twitter) and LinkedIn.
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