After more than three decades of service with IRS Criminal Investigation (CI), CI Chief Guy Ficco is leaving the agency. His last day is today.

Changes At The Department

Ficco became Chief in April of 2024, and within a year the second Trump Administration had begun to make major changes at CI and the IRS. Hiring freezes were put in place, including at CI. By June 2025, 250 CI employees had been reassigned to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Three months later, that number had grown to 1,700 assigned to ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO).

To appreciate just how big a diversion of manpower that was, it helps to know there were only about 3,000 CI employees as of the end of fiscal 2025 on September 30, and about 2,200 of those were agents.

Now, Ficco says CI is pulling back agents from immigration activities and getting them back to CI’s core mission: following the money in tax and other fraud cases.

Leading the department through that time period was, he says, a challenge. But “I’m proud of that,” he explains, and “I’m proud that CI is in a position to move forward.”

CI has also made “some tremendous steps” in utilizing technology and leveraging artificial intelligence in its activities, which Ficco counts as a positive. That’s been a significant development, considering the loss of personnel and, he notes, changes at the Department of Justice. The DOJ’s Tax Division is now not a division, it's just a section in a division. That, combined with some mixed messaging from the DOJ, has raised concerns from some about the effectiveness of CI in the future. Ficco, however, remains focused on the agency’s core mission: tax crimes. “I really believe criminal tax is vital to enforcement in driving voluntary compliance,” Ficco explains.

Ficco was the 26th Chief to hold the post since Elmer Lincoln Irey was given the nod in 1919. Ficco took over from Chief Jim Lee, who announced his retirement from federal service in February 2024. Ficco will be succeeded by Jarod Koopman.

Ficco believes that Koopman will inherit a workforce that is still dedicated to the core mission. In terms of tax, Ficco notes that employment tax—the failure of companies to remit payroll taxes they’ve collected from employees—remains a crucial piece of that mission. Ficco says that following up on cases where taxes aren’t remitted accounts for about 10% of CI’s work.

Outside of tax, CI has been working on benefits fraud cases like the those in Minnesota. CI agents have been conducting those investigations for years, he said, resulting in over 80 indictments. He believes that similar benefit fraud is being committed across the country, although maybe not on the same scale. “Whether those end up being tax crimes or they end up being another type of money laundering or wire fraud or conspiracy, that I don't know, but I think that that's an area that we're certainly going to put some heavy focus on.”

As for what’s next for Ficco personally? He’s not sharing those details just yet, but says, “I don't think my personality will allow me to sit idle too long.”

It’s not surprising that Ficco chose to work in public service—he comes from a family of government employees. His dad was a New York City bus driver, while his brother worked with the Department of Defense as an auditor. But it was likely his sister who most influenced his role with the IRS since she was a Revenue Officer with the agency.

Ficco, who holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a concentration in accounting from Dominican University in New York, began his career with the IRS as part of a co-op program between his junior and senior years of college. In his first week, he was assigned to work on inventory involving a case with “massive amounts of records.” It wasn’t his favorite assignment, and, he explains, coupled with a three-hour drive home, made him think that perhaps joining the IRS was a mistake. He wrote his resignation letter, but his sister talked him out of submitting it (she has since passed away).

Ficco focused on white-collar crime for most of his career. It helped that he was thrown into a major tax shelter trial early on and realized that he enjoyed the work, including the opportunity to work alongside the federal prosecutors assigned to the case. And while he jokes that “love might be too strong a word,” he didn’t mind the long hours and strategy involved in building a case.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms, was accused of aggressively marketing tax shelters to wealthy individuals. The tax shelters had names that sounded like codenames—BLIPS (Bond Linked Issue Premium Structures), FLIPs (Foreign Leveraged Investment Program), OPIS (Offshore Portfolio Investment Strategy), and SOS (Short Option Strategies) —but were largely vehicles for creating artificial losses on paper to offset real income. The IRS and Department of Justice began investigating, focusing on whether KPMG knowingly designed and sold abusive shelters that generated at least $11 billion in phony tax losses. Eventually, it turned into a full-blown criminal case, and as a working special agent, Ficco had a front-row seat to the controversy.

Eventually, KPMG admitted to criminal wrongdoing and agreed to pay $456 million in fines, restitution, and penalties as part of a deferred prosecution agreement. In addition to the agreement, nine individuals, including six former KPMG partners and the firm's former deputy chairman, were criminally prosecuted.

(The criminal cases against individual defendants had mixed outcomes, with several pleading guilty, others securing dismissals after a ruling related to prosecutorial interference focused on the payment of legal fees, and some convictions later overturned or limited on appeal.)

Still, Ficco wasn’t focused on a management track. That changed when he met his now-wife, which led him to stay in Washington, D.C. Being in the nation’s capital meant he spent more time with CI management (Don Fort was Chief at the time, and Eric Hylton was Deputy Chief). The existing team, he explains, was very encouraging and told him that he had the experience and aptitude for CI management. That led to a promotion to the Deputy Chief role in 2022, and eventually to Chief.

The Chief of IRS Criminal Investigation (CI) leads the IRS’s law enforcement arm, focusing on criminal violations of tax and financial laws rather than civil compliance. This role sets national enforcement priorities, oversees investigations into offenses like tax evasion, fraud, and money laundering, and ensures cases are developed for referral to the Department of Justice for prosecution. The Chief also coordinates closely with other federal agencies, reflecting the fact that many financial crimes intersect with broader criminal activity.

Beyond investigations, the Chief functions as a senior executive, managing personnel, budget, and strategy for CI’s nationwide operations. The role also carries a public-facing component, using high-profile enforcement actions to deter misconduct and signal priorities. In essence, the CI Chief sits at the intersection of tax expertise and criminal enforcement, guiding how the government tracks, builds, and prosecutes financial crime cases.

CI, the sixth-largest law enforcement agency in the U.S., is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS and conducts financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, and identity theft.

CI agents are trained both as financial experts and federal law enforcement officers, meaning they can trace complex transactions and carry badges and firearms. They frequently collaborate with agencies such as the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security, especially in cases where tax violations intersect with broader criminal activity. 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.

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