As the business world continues to reorganize around computers, so does IRS Criminal Investigation. Today, computers are everywhere, with nearly all financial records being created, maintained and stored in digital form. More than half of those records will never even make it into a paper format.

Recognizing that electronic crimes are now integral to CI's mission to investigate tax evasion, money laundering and other financial fraud, the Electronic Crimes Program was officially formed in September, 2000. The E-Crimes Program is staffed with Computer Investigative Specialists (CIS) who assist case agents with financial investigations by acquiring, preserving, extracting and analyzing digital evidence.

Last year, CISs seized more than 85 terabytes of digital information through warrants. To put that in context, the entire contents of the Library of Congress can be contained within 16 terabytes.

To assist the 115 CISs located around the country, the E-Crimes Program maintains two support facilities. The Data Input Center in Kentucky is a state-of-the-art scanning and transcription center capable of converting volumes of paper evidence into digital format to be examined using modern computer techniques.

A research and training facility was recently opened in Virginia to focus on developing and enhancing techniques for processing digital evidence, using new technology, warehousing existing technology and providing training to CISs.

One of the more significant enhancements created by IRS CI includes the development of ILOOK, a forensic software tool. This two-part product, owned by IRS CI, automates the hard-drive analysis process and makes it possible for a CIS to quickly review the multi-gigabyte drives found in today’s computers.

The ILOOK Imager is a Linux-based product that allows the Computer Investigative Specialist to image almost every PC-based machine encountered, including mass data storage systems and non-Microsoft operating systems.

ILOOK Investigator is the analysis portion of the product. It allows data reduction, recovery of deleted files and the ability to search for specific details. It also allows the user to insert foreign language character sets to search for information. ILOOK is supported by the FBI and NASA and is distributed free to state and local law enforcement agencies.

Agencies who qualify for the free distribution of ILOOK and are interested in learning more about this program, please contact Stephen Moore at stephen.moore@ci.irs.gov. 

About the Author
Special Agent Stephen Moore, JD, is the public information officer at IRS Criminal Investigation, Detroit. He serves on the MACPA Fraud Issues Task Force.