The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to combat increasingly sophisticated fraud schemes, as criminals also leverage AI to launch high-volume and complex attacks.

To bolster its efforts, the agency is staffing up its criminal investigation branch with more investigators, ensuring it remains one step ahead in the fight against financial crimes.

In an interview with Federal News Network, Jarod Koopman, IRS Criminal Investigations’ Executive Director of Cyber and Forensics, said, “What used to take a significant amount of effort, going into some type of a social media-type exploit or a hack, they can now do this with AI that’s much more efficient, much more effective, and certainly much more volume at high speed.”

He disclosed that online payment fraud has surpassed $360 billion annually, while check fraud is experiencing a sharp surge.

Additionally, he also stated that while the agency isn’t currently utilizing AI for these tax recovery cases, IRS-CI is exploring AI as a potential tool for “that exact scenario.”

However, last year, the General Accounting Office (GAO) found that IRS’ initiative employing AI to pinpoint audit cases and detect noncompliance lacked proper documentation for crucial aspects of its technology-driven sample selection models.

“IRS is piloting a new process for sampling tax returns for NRP’s audits. The new process uses artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the efficiency and selection of audit cases to help identify non-compliance. However, IRS has not completed its documentation of several elements of its AI sample selection models, such as key components and technical specifications,” GAO said in a report.