WASHINGTON — As the nature of financial crime changes, with technology and AI increasingly used to perpetrate illegal acts, the IRS’s crime fighting arm —IRS Criminal Investigation— is announcing a new program intended to improve how it interacts with financial institutions.

Called Feedback in Response to Strategic Threat —or CI-FIRST— the program unveiled Friday is intended to speed up subpoena requests, give banks better data on how to detect criminal activity and build out investigations faster and more efficiently.

Under the Bank Secrecy Act, banks and financial institutions are required to send over a variety of suspicious-activity reports to the federal government after detecting potential money laundering or terrorist financing.

The IRS says the goal for CI-FIRST is to help financial institutions more easily detect and report financial crimes tied to fentanyl trafficking, drug trafficking, human smuggling and other crimes — by streamlining subpoena requests and improving data-sharing with banks. IRS-CI chief Guy Ficco said in a statement that “public-private partnerships thrive when everyone mutually benefits.”

Also Friday, IRS Criminal Investigation released new statistics highlighting how the agency has investigated financial crimes using Bank Secrecy Act data.

The agency found $21.1 billion in fraud tied to tax and financial crimes from 2022 to 2024, seized $8.2 billion in assets tied to criminal activity in the same period and recouped $1.4 billion in restitution for crime victims, according to the agency.

IRS-CI special agents ran an average of 966,900 searches annually against currency transaction reports, which are financial documents that banks must file with Treasury for any cash transaction exceeding $10,000 in a single day. In the past three years, 67% of cases opened by IRS-CI involved one or more currency transaction reports below $40,000, with half of currency transaction reports involving amounts less than $22,230.