Referrals by the Internal Revenue Service for possible criminal tax violations by large corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals plummeted follwing President Donald Trump’s return to office, with the agency’s division responsible for auditing big businesses and billionaires sending at most two cases to criminal investigators in fiscal year 2025, according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

ICIJ said the data it obtained does not indicate whether the two criminal referrals by the IRS’s Large Business and International division made in fiscal year 2025, which began in October of 2024, occurred under the Biden or Trump administration. The division did not refer any cases involving suspected ultra-wealthy tax cheats between October 1, 2025, and January 31, 2026, the investigative news outlet said. 

The marked drop compares to the seven such referrals per fiscal year in 2023 and 2024, which came amid a Biden administration push to better scrutinize large corporations and wealthy taxpayers. The last time the department’s criminal referrals were as low as fiscal year 2025 was fiscal year 2019, ICIJ said. 

The news outlet previously reported that IRS audits of billionaires and large businesses slowed dramatically after the agency’s staff levels were reduced and budgets frozen amid a rapid cost-cutting effort led by billionaire Elon Musk. The new referral figures are among the first enforcement metrics from the IRS’s Large Business and International Division during Trump’s second term, ICIJ said.

The agency’s Global High Wealth office within the division, which focuses on billionaire audits, was hit especially hard after Trump took office, losing 38 percent of its staff within weeks. The office had expanded during the Biden administration as the IRS hired specialists to parse complex tax strategies, but that growth left it with a large share of recent hires who had fewer job protections and were quickly fired, the news outlet reported.

“When the IRS budget and staff is cut, your taxes don’t go down. Instead, those that choose not to play by the rules shift the burden of funding our government to those that do,” former IRS commissioner Danny Werfel told ICIJ. “The apparent sharp reduction in the inventory of IRS criminal fraud referrals is a textbook example of that.”

Read more at ICIJ