Taken as a whole, the data provide a highly misleading picture of the enforcement efforts of one of the IRS's most important components, the Office of Criminal Investigation. Because these data cannot be relied upon to describe IRS's criminal enforcement efforts, we have not used them for our Web sites. In addition, the IRS data are internally inconsistent. Coverage shifts as cases move through the system, resulting in an erroneous picture of the flow of workload from IRS investigators to federal prosecutors and then to the federal courts and final sentencing. These problems are of a long standing nature.
Cases simply vanish from the system without explanation.
Cases, recorded by the IRS at one point in the process from investigation to prosecution and sentencing are not consistently recorded and tracked. Counts Don't Match Other Independent Data Systems. Doesn't Agree with Other Data Systems. Third, even when the same case is recorded in IRS Criminal Investigation databases and other independent data systems, the information recorded about these cases differed. For example,in the NAPA study, the size of the tax deficiency recorded by IRS Criminal Investigation was three times larger than that recorded by the IRS Examination Division on the cases selected for study.