Federal Bureau of Investigation

The FBI has decreased the number of investigations it has opened nearly in half since September 11, 2001.^[1] The internal audit, conducted by the Inspector General for the Department of Justice, Glenn A. Fine, looked at the number of investigations opened by the FBI in the year 2000, and then compared them to the investigations opened in 2004.^[2] In 2000, nearly 63,000 criminal investigations were conducted, while just over 34,000 were conducted in 2004.^[3]

A number of surprising revelations are contained in the report. For example, in 2000, nearly 75% of the FBI’s field agents were allocated to criminal investigations and 25% were allocated to terrorism-related investigations; in 2004, those numbers stood at 65% and 35% respectively.^[4] In the four traditional crime allocations (organized crime/drugs, violent crime, white collar crime, and civil rights) only civil rights violations maintained the same number of agents (153) allocated to such investigations.^[5] In all other areas, there was a drop in the allotted number of agents to the investigations; all told, 1,143 fewer agents have been allocated to the traditional criminal investigations, with organized crime/drug investigations seeing the largest drop-off (2,279 down to 1,547).^[6]

From a white-collar crime perspective, Inspector Fine notes that FBI officials at each site the Office of the Inspector General [hereinafter OIG] visited placed more emphasis on those financial crimes which are near the top of the FBI’s national priorities,^[7] such as securities fraud, health care fraud, and financial institution fraud [hereinafter FIF].^[8] As a result, low-dollar FIF or low-priority areas like telemarketing fraud and wire/mail fraud have seen investigative efforts reduced.^[9] Furthermore, to identify high-level investigations, FBI field offices have implemented dollar-related thresholds to determine whether to open a case;^[10] typically, cases involving losses under $100,000 received only nominal investigative efforts.^[11] In 2000, nearly 27% of cases involved losses under $100,000, but in 2004, only 7% of cases did.^[12]

As noted, the reprioritization shows a new emphasis on terror investigations, but those have not been without their controversies. Over the weekend, it was reported that the FBI has admitted that it has made mistakes in Internet and phone intercepts.^[13] The FBI would not disclose how often these mistakes happen, and there is no way of knowing whether the intercepts are used to open an investigation.^[14] According to an OIG report on the FBI’s backlog of intercepted but unreviewed foreign-language conversations, an undetermined number of 38,514 untranslated hours were “collections of materials from the wrong source due to technical problems.”^[15] FBI spokesman Ed Cogswell stated that when a tap was placed on a telephone number other than one authorized by a court, “[t]hat’s mainly an instance in which the telephone company hooked us up to the wrong number or a clerical error gives us the wrong number.”^[16] He would give no more specifics, and mentioned that while the secret court that gave the authorization would be advised of the mistake, he could not say “whether people are notified that their conversations were mistakenly intercepted or whether wrongly tapped telephone numbers were deleted from bureau records.”^[17]

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[1] Report: FBI Opening Fewer Criminal Cases, CNN.com, Oct. 3, 2005, available here.
[2] Id.
[3] Id.
[4] OIG, The External Effects of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Reprioritization Efforts, Sept. 2005, at iii, available here. (PDF)
[5] Id. at iv.
[6] Id.
[7] Id. at 37.
[8] Id. at 35, ex. 5-2.
[9] Id. at 37.
[10] Id.
[11] Id. at 41.
[12] Id. at 41, ex. 5-7.
[13] Sorry, Wrong Wiretap, CNN.com, Oct. 1, 2005, available here.
[14] Id.
[15] Id.
[16] Id.
[17] Id.