Daily Archives: January 30, 2016

1. On Day One, the President directs each relevant federal financial agency to restore a superb criminal referral process, the criminal referral mandate, and criminal referral coordinators, at every federal financial agency. Local and state police forces rarely investigate sophisticated financial frauds.  That work is done overwhelmingly by roughly 2,000 FBI agents in the white-collar section.  That means that we have roughly two FBI agents per industry.  Those numbers mean that FBI agents don’t “walk a beat” – they only come when they receive a criminal referral alerting them to a likely fraud.  It also means that they cannot possibly have more than a few agents with expertise in the particular industry.  There is one other key fact to keep in mind – corporations don’t make criminal referrals against their own CEOs for obvious reasons, even though frauds led by CEOs cause by far the greatest harm of any form of fraud.

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