# IRS Congressional Update: 100th anniversary of IRS Criminal Investigation (2019)

Canonical: https://mobfiles.org/items/irs-congressional-update-ci-100th-anniversary/

A short IRS item saying the Intelligence Unit was created in 1919 to combat corruption in the U.S. tax system, that Elmer Irey chaired it from 1919 to 1946, and that tax violations brought down figures including Al Capone.

This is one paragraph of the IRS Congressional Update (Publication 5084, 2019). It says the IRS celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Intelligence Unit, "created in 1919 to combat corruption in the U.S. tax system," now Criminal Investigation; that Elmer Irey was its chief from 1919 to 1946; and that in 1919 the Unit "had just six special agents, who completed 83 tax fraud investigations." It adds that "tax violations brought down criminals like Al Capone, Enoch 'Nucky' Johnson and John Gotti."

This is a thin source: a compiled congressional update, of which only the paragraph is saved here. Its "last month" wording places it in summer 2019, but the compiled file's own date was not established. The IRS's dedicated history pages returned a 404 error to the tools used here, so a fuller IRS account of the Intelligence Unit during Prohibition remains a gap.

## Sources

- Internal Revenue Service: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/p5084--2019.pdf