What Does the IRS Criminal Investigation Process Look Like? So there are two answers to this question number one is "What does the IRS criminal investigation process look like from the IRS site?" and number two "What does it look like?" so from the IRS side of from things the criminal investigation process begins with a referral the IRS doesn't just sit in their office and pick people at random to initiate criminal investigations on what usually happens is a referral will come into the criminal investigative unit either through an audit or through a collections officer or through a whistleblower or through some other third party government investigation so CI will take that lien they'll examine. The information that's being presented in the referral and then decide whether they want to devote investigative resources to looking at that case or not if they do decide that they want to devote investigative resources then CI invokes on a fact-finding mission so CID cases take many years to build in a lot of cases and so what they're doing is they're constantly looking for information they're trying to develop a case and the goal is is when CI puts a case in the hands of a United States attorney that US attorney has every tool they need in order to secure a conviction so CI agents take their time they're very meticulous they're very careful and it's only after they take great care and caution do they've let their investigation known to the public or to the subject or target of that investigation from the clients side of things. The client may or may not be aware that CI is involved again if you see any other videos in this series.

The second CI becomes involved in you're aware of it get a criminal tax attorney involved but from a client side of things a CI investigation can be ongoing for a year or two or even three before the clients really even aware of it so the client may become aware of it because somebody may call them and say hey I had this special agent show up at my house to interview me and he asked me a bunch of questions about you or they may get noticed that CI has looked at their bank records or some comment may have been made or whatever but the point is is the clients experience with the process usually doesn't come until later once the client becomes involved in the CI process then it's about mitigation there's usually a not a lot of contact with the special agents it's not like they chat openly about their criminal investigations particularly who to the people that they're investigating so there's limited information sharing there's limited back-and-forth there may be a u.s. attorney involved there's usually one supervising the investigation but not always and so you want to make sure that from a client' perspective you take a very measured approach to this a criminal investigation as I like to say is a marathon and not a sprint so the client needs to prepare himself or herself to make sure that they're doing everything along in the process to mitigate their risk appropriately criminal investigations are often frustrating the clients they can take many many months if not years to resolve and there's a lot of time and effort that goes into them but it's very very important I mean when you're dealing with a criminal investigation the stakes couldn't be any higher because a lot of times clients are looking at really significant felony charges at the end of them so you want to make sure that you do your best that you guide yourself through the process that you take it step by step and then you do everything you can to mitigate or dismiss the charges flat out.