[英語] F.B.I.Struggles to Handle Financial Fraud Cases

WASHINGTON —The Federal Bureau ofInvestigation is struggling to find enough agents and resources toinvestigate criminal wrongdoing tied to the country’s economic crisis,according to current and former bureau officials.
The bureau slashed its criminal investigative work force to expandits national security role after the Sept.11attacks,shifting morethan 1,800agents,or nearly one-third of all agents in criminalprograms,to terrorism and intelligence duties.Current and formerofficials say the cutbacks have left the bureau seriously exposed ininvestigating areas like white-collar crime,which has taken on urgentimportance in recent weeks because of the nation’s economic woes.
The pressure on the F.B.I.has recently increased with thedisclosure of criminal investigations into some of the largest playersin the financial collapse,including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.TheF.B.I.is planning to double the number of agents working financialcrimes by reassigning several hundred agents amid a mood of nationalalarm.But some people inside and out of the Justice Department wonderwhere the agents will come from and whether they will be enough.
So depleted are the ranks of the F.B.I.’s white-collar investigatorsthat executives in the private sector say they have had difficultyattracting the bureau’s attention in cases involving possible frauds ofmillions of dollars.
Since 2004,F.B.I.officials have warned that mortgage fraud posed alooming threat,and the bureau has repeatedly asked the Bushadministration for more money to replenish the ranks of agents handlingnonterrorism investigations,according to records and interviews.Buteach year,the requests have been denied,with no new agents approvedfor financial crimes,as policy makers focused on counterterrorism.
According to previously undisclosed internal F.B.I.data,thecutbacks have been particularly severe in staffing for investigationsinto white-collar crimes like mortgage fraud,with a loss of 625agents,or 36percent of its 2001levels.
Over all,the number of criminal cases that the F.B.I.has broughtto federal prosecutors —including a wide range of crimes like drugtrafficking and violent crime —dropped 26percent in the last sevenyears,going from 11,029cases to 8,187,Justice Department data showed.
“Clearly,we have felt the effects of moving resources from criminalinvestigations to national security,”said John Miller,an assistantdirector at the F.B.I.“In white-collar crime,while we initiated fewercases over all,we targeted the areas where we could have the biggestimpact.We focused on multimillion-dollar corporate fraud,where wecould make arrests but also recover money for the fraud victims.”
But Justice Department data,which include cases from otheragencies,like the Secret Service and Postal Service,illustrate theimpact.Prosecutions of frauds against financial institutions dropped48percent from 2000to 2007,insurance fraud cases plummeted 75percent,and securities fraud cases dropped 17percent.
Statistics from a research group at Syracuse University,theTransactional Records Access Clearinghouse,using somewhat differentmethodology and looking only at the F.B.I.,show an even steeperdecline of nearly 50percent in overall white-collar crime prosecutionsin the same period.
In addition to the investigations into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,the F.B.I.is carrying out investigations of American InternationalGroup and Lehman Brothers,and it has opened more than 1,500othermortgage-related investigations.Some F.B.I.officials worry privatelythat the trillion-dollar federal bailout of the financial industry mayitself become a problem because it contains inadequate controls todeter fraud.
No one has suggested that a quicker response would have averted themortgage meltdown,but some officials said a faster reaction might havedeterred more of the early schemes that seized on loose federal lendingregulations.
“They were very late to the game,”Representative Zoe Lofgren,aCalifornia Democrat who has quarreled with the F.B.I.over itsfinancing priorities,said of the bureau’s response to the mortgagecrisis.“They were not on top of this,and they’re just now starting toreally do something.”
Republicans and Democrats in Congress are pushing for a moreaggressive response by the F.B.I.Representatives Mark S.Kirk,anIllinois Republican who sits on the House appropriations committee,andChris P.Carney,a Pennsylvania Democrat,called on Congress to triplethe F.B.I.’s financing for financial crimes investigations.
“To fix our system and prevent a repeat of the events we now see,”they wrote in a letter this month to Robert S.Mueller III,the F.B.I.director,“we have got to set an example by bringing the full might offederal law enforcement against the people who illegally profited ordestroyed companies at the expense of our country.”
In public,Mr.Mueller has said that the bureau is doing more withless,when it comes to criminal prosecutions.And Justice Departmentofficials have repeatedly asserted the administration’s commitment tofight violent and white-collar crime even as they have not provided thebureau additional resources.
But current and former officials say Mr.Mueller has lost abehind-the-scenes battle with the Justice Department and the Office ofManagement and Budget to replenish the criminal ranks.
Interviews and internal records show that F.B.I.officials realizedthe growing danger posed by financial fraud in the housing marketbeginning in 2003and 2004but were rebuffed by the Justice Departmentand the budget office in their efforts to acquire more resources.
“The administration’s top priority since the 9/11attacks has beencounterterrorism,”Peter Carr,a Justice Department spokesman,said.“In part,that’s reflected by a significant investment of resources atthe F.B.I.to answer the call from Congress and the American public tobecome a domestic intelligence agency in addition to a law enforcementagency.”
From 2001to 2007,the F.B.I.sought an increase of more than 1,100agents for criminal investigations apart from national security.Instead,it suffered a decrease of 132agents,according to internalF.B.I.figures obtained by The New York Times.During these years,thebureau asked for an increase of $800million,but received only $50million more.In the 2007budget cycle,the F.B.I.obtained money for atotal of one new agent for criminal investigations.
In 2004,one senior F.B.I.official,Chris Swecker,warned publiclythat a flood of fraudulent mortgage deals had the potential to become“an epidemic.”Yet the next year,as public warnings about fraud in thesubprime lending markets began to approach their height,the F.B.I.hadthe equivalent of only 15full-time agents devoted to mortgage fraudout of a total of some 13,000agents in the bureau.
That number has grown to 177agents,who have opened 1,522cases.But the staffing level is still hundreds of agents below the levelsseen in the 1980s during the savings and loan crisis.
F.B.I.officials said they had had no choice but to make the cuts inthe criminal division,which they said were necessary to expand thebureau’s national security effort,particularly in the wake ofcriticism of the bureau’s performance in failing to detect the Sept.11plot.
In white-collar crime,they said the bureau has given up onlylower-level cases of marginal significance that might have never beenprosecuted anyway.They say they have focused the available criminalresources on public corruption and other difficult crime issues inwhich the F.B.I.can make a unique contribution.
“We only had a finite number of white-collar crime agents availableto address the threat that mortgage fraud posed,”said Joseph Ford,whoretired from the F.B.I.this year and once served as its chieffinancial officer.
The Justice Department is relying more than ever on the state andlocal authorities to pick up the slack through joint task forces.Andprivate investigators say that companies victimized by fraud areturning to them in increasing numbers because they are unable toattract much attention from the F.B.I.anymore.
In some instances,private investigative and accounting firms arenow collecting evidence,taking witness statements and even testifyingbefore grand juries,in effect preparing courtroom-ready prosecutionsthey can take to the F.B.I.or local authorities.
“Anytime you bring to the F.B.I.a case that is thoroughlyinvestigated and reduce the amount of work for investigators,thelikelihood is that they will take the case and present it forprosecution,”said Alton Sizemore,a former F.B.I.agent who is a fraudexaminer for Forensic Strategic Solutions in Birmingham,Ala.
One American company facing extortion demands last year from acomputer hacker used private investigators from the Kroll firm to domuch of the legwork in the case as the F.B.I.monitored and directedthe situation behind the scenes,said Daniel Karson,executive managingdirector for Kroll.The private investigators even went undercover andset up a sting operation that led them to Germany,where theauthorities made an arrest.
Mr.Karson said the F.B.I.no longer had the resources to take onsuch lower-level cases by itself.“When you come in with a gardenvariety,plain vanilla crime,you may have to stand in the queue,”hesaid.
Some critics question whether the shift indicates not just a lack ofresources,but a lack of interest by the Bush administration.
After the collapse of Enron in 2002,the Justice Department movedaggressively against corporate fraud —too aggressively,in the view ofsome people within the administration.It set up a national task forceto tackle the problem,garnered hundreds of convictions at companieslike WorldCom,Adelphia and Enron,and forced the closure of ArthurAndersen,the accounting firm,for its role in the Enron collapse.
But several former law enforcement officials said in interviews thatsenior administration officials,particularly at the White House andthe Treasury Department,had made clear to them that they wereconcerned the Justice Department and the F.B.I.were taking anantibusiness attitude that could chill corporate risk taking.
Justice Department officials said political pressures had neverinfluenced the way prosecutors approached corporate cases.But thedepartment’s approach has become noticeably more tempered in the lastseveral years.
This spring and summer,as public concerns about the subprimemortgage crisis were growing,Attorney General Michael B.Mukaseyrejected repeated calls for the creation of a national task force likethe one used after the Enron collapse.The attorney general likened theproblem to “white-collar street-crime”that could best be handled byindividual United States attorneys’offices.
In the last four years,the Justice Department has scored fewer ofthe big-name prosecutions that marked President Bush’s first term inoffice.Even when investigations have pointed to corporate wrongdoing,the Justice Department has agreed,in dozens of cases in the last fouryears,to “deferred prosecutions"that allowed companies to pay finesin order to avoid criminal prosecution.
Paul J.McNulty,who served as deputy attorney general underAlberto R.Gonzales,said the complexity of white-collar investigationsand the shortage of investigators had driven a decline in high-profilecases.
“There’s no question that the department has been stretched thinwhen it comes to resources generally,and that has affectedwhite-collar enforcement in a variety of areas,”Mr.McNulty said in aninterview.
“What happened is that the first years after the Enron collapse,there were some very high profile,noticeable cases —the low-hangingfruit —that gave Justice the opportunity to rack up some very bigwins,”he said.“Those cases played themselves out and it becametougher to find those big cases.”