Mock IRS Criminal Investigation
By Patrick Rupinski, Staff Reporter,
Tuscaloosa News, November 2011
A team wearing bulletproof vests that identified themselves as IRS criminal investigators rifled through trash on The University of Alabama campus on Monday, November 15. Two accountancy professors were handcuffed. And a federal judge even came to campus to review testimony before approving search warrants.
No, it wasn't the ultimate white-collar crime bust at UA. It was a simulated exercise to show accounting students what a career in criminal forensic accounting is like.
Twenty agents from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division participated in the exercise, working alongside 26 junior and senior accountancy majors during the day. Faculty members and graduate students also participated, taking on roles that ranged from snitches to criminals.
“I even got to be a whistleblower,” said Mary Stone, Director of UA's Culverhouse School of Accountancy. Stone played the role of a waitress at Cheater's Bar & Grill who decided to rat out her boss for cheating on his taxes by keeping two sets of books.
Stone told the investigators she never saw her boss's record books, but she heard him brag about it and knew that he was trying to sell his business for an excess amount — a lot more than he could get if the business earned what he reported on his taxes.
There was no solid evidence of tax fraud, just a tip to investigate, according to the scenario. Students had to observe the suspect and his business — props were set up in the faculty lounge at Alston Hall to resemble a bar and an apartment — and even look through the suspect's trash as they pieced together a case.
They then met with U.S. District Judge Scott Cooger of Tuscaloosa, who played the role of a federal magistrate who issued search warrants after the students convinced him there was probable cause.
After the students executed the warrant and searched the bar and apartment, they presented their findings to a mock grand jury set up in the moot courtroom of the UA School of Law.
Veronica Hyman-Pillot, assistant special agent in charge of IRS Criminal Investigations at the agency's Atlanta office, said the exercise “gives students an interactive experience in what IRS criminal investigation agents do day to day.”
The exercise, known as the Adrian Project, serves as a recruiting tool for the IRS, she said.
Hyman-Pillot said IRS criminal investigators are sworn in as special agents trained in law enforcement. New recruits, who must be younger than 37, have a bachelor's degree and at least 15 course hours in accounting, go through a 22-week training course at the IRS's academy in Brunswick, Ga. The agents are trained in firearms and self-defense and must pass physical fitness tests like other law enforcement officers, as well as train in accounting forensics and evidence gathering.