Every criminal case brought under the internal revenue laws moves to a new Justice Department division on Monday, and the rule that moves them was never put out for comment

Every criminal tax prosecution in the country gets a new landlord on Monday.

The Justice Department has created the National Fraud Enforcement Division and assigned it, in the words of the regulation, all criminal proceedings arising under the internal revenue laws. The rule was filed for public inspection on Monday morning and takes effect on August 24. Todd Blanche, the Acting Attorney General, signed it on August 13.

There was no comment period. The department treats this as a rule of agency organisation, procedure and practice, which the Administrative Procedure Act exempts from notice and comment and from the usual 30-day wait before a rule bites. It says the same exemption means the rule is not a rule for Congressional Review Act purposes either, so no report goes to Congress. The Office of Management and Budget did not review it.

What the new division gets

New section 0.70 lists six categories before it reaches the catch-alls. Criminal fraud generally, except the conspiracy-to-defraud cases the Antitrust Division keeps. All criminal proceedings arising under the internal revenue laws. Trade fraud, which the rule spells out as importation of goods, customs duties, tariffs or other external revenue, and foreign commerce. Money owed to or paid by the United States. Fraud or abuse involving health plans. Health care fraud and controlled substances distribution and diversion schemes.

Then it widens. The division may take any case the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General hands it, or any case another Assistant Attorney General agrees to give it, notwithstanding anything else in the part. It may seek fraud injunctions under 18 U.S.C. 1345, restitution, forfeiture and penalties on the back of those proceedings. It may charge any federal criminal provision in a case brought under the six headings. And where an investigation opened under one of those headings turns up something else entirely, paragraph (k) lets the division prosecute that too.

The paragraph that was only eight months old

The rule also deletes 28 CFR 0.55(w), which assigned criminal tax prosecutions to the Criminal Division.

That paragraph was itself recent. Criminal tax work landed in the Criminal Division on December 10, 2025, when the functions of the Tax Division were transferred out to the Civil and Criminal Divisions, a change the department cites in this rule at 90 FR 57139. So a case opened in the spring has now been reassigned twice inside a single year, and the second reassignment carries no transition provision at all.

Two smaller changes worth reading

Section 0.71 gives the new Assistant Attorney General two certification powers that mirror the ones the Criminal Division already holds: the certification under 18 U.S.C. 3331 that a special grand jury is necessary in a judicial district, and the certification under 18 U.S.C. 3503 that a proceeding is against somebody believed to have taken part in organised criminal activity, which is what unlocks a deposition to preserve testimony.

The other change is not about this division at all. Section 0.13(b) previously let every Assistant Attorney General redelegate litigating authority to Section Chiefs, with one carve-out: the authority to designate attorneys to conduct grand jury proceedings could not be passed down. That carve-out is now gone, across the whole department, in a rule whose title is about setting up a division. The department describes it as a technical and consistency change giving Assistant Attorneys General greater flexibility.