DOJ Announces New Priorities, Signaling a Renewed Focus on White Collar and Criminal Fraud Enforcement 

In a busy week of major policy changes for the Department of Justice (“DOJ” or the “Department”), Assistant Attorney General (“AAG”) Colin McDonald issued a memorandum on August 13, 2026, to all personnel of the Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division (“NFED” or the “Fraud Division”), describing the Fraud Division’s structure, staffing plans, and five key enforcement priorities. The memorandum arrived days after DOJ renamed the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section the “White Collar and Corporate Enforcement Section,” and days before the August 18, 2026 final rule transferred health care, tax, and trade fraud jurisdiction to NFED. Together, these developments mark one of the more significant reorganizations of federal fraud enforcement in recent memory.

DOJ created NFED in April 2026 to consolidate investigative fraud resources that had previously been spread across the Department. The August memorandum demonstrates how far that consolidation has progressed, with DOJ promising a surge in NFED resources to reach approximately 500 attorneys and staff by the end of August 2026, with continued growth over the next two years. The memorandum cites Government Accountability Office estimates that federal fraud losses run between $233 billion and $521 billion annually, and frames NFED’s buildout as a direct response to that figure.

Structure and Resources

NFED’s five stated priority areas — Public Trust and Financial Integrity, Health Care, Internal Revenue, Global Trade and Commerce, and Corporate Misconduct — are reflected in its specialized litigating sections: the Public Trust and Financial Integrity Section, the Health Care Fraud Section, the Tax Section, the Global Trade & Commerce Enforcement Section, and the Corporate Enforcement Section. The organizational chart accompanying the memorandum also identifies a National Enforcement Section, a District Fraud Counsel Section, an Appellate Section, a Special Matters Section, and a Criminal Investigation Section, each reporting through its own Deputy Assistant Attorney General. According to AAG McDonald, new attorneys will typically begin their careers in the National Enforcement Section before rotating into the Fraud Division’s other components.

DOJ describes the buildout as an “infusion of resources from across government” and the deployment of “considerable resources” — in substance, a resource surge. In AAG McDonald’s words, “The Department is reorganizing substantial resources from other Department components” to increase NFED’s headcount to “approximately five hundred attorneys and staff by August 24, 2026.” He says the Fraud Division will “continue to rapidly grow for the next two years” under what he calls an “aggressive plan to significantly increase the number of Division personnel.” AAG McDonald also states that DOJ is building “the most sophisticated, innovative, and data-driven white-collar law enforcement component in the world,” organized to be “lean, flat, and agile.”

An Asset Recovery Section is also worth flagging. The organizational chart places it under a Deputy Assistant Attorney General alongside the Appellate, Corporate Enforcement, and Special Matters Sections, while the memorandum says Fraud Division prosecutors will be supported by asset recovery attorneys and investigators. Paired with the Fraud Division’s investment in data analytics, we read this as a signal that DOJ intends to prioritize recovery of fraud proceeds — through forfeiture and restitution — as heavily as it prioritizes prosecution, potentially utilizing civil and administrative forfeiture tools for matters that never result in criminal charges.

The memorandum also references a “task force incubation program” designed, in AAG McDonald’s words, to “empower and launch emerging leaders who bring new ideas to the fight against fraud.” Few agency reorganizations build this kind of mechanism into their initial structure, and its inclusion here suggests DOJ expects NFED’s enforcement theories to keep developing well past this memorandum.

DOJ’s establishment of NFED appears to draw clearer lines between public and private fraud. Statements by the Department suggest NFED will handle fraud against the public fisc — government procurement, benefit programs, tax, and trade. And the newly renamed White Collar and Corporate Enforcement Section seems poised to keep jurisdiction over private-sector financial crime and cases involving violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”). Precisely how DOJ plans to allocate white collar cases amongst the sections remains uncertain, and we expect some further ironing out at the margins, particularly for corporate misconduct touching both public and private interests.

NFED’s Five New Priority Areas for Enforcement

Public Trust and Financial Integrity. NFED describes government procurement fraud — defective pricing, bid rigging, self-dealing, product substitution —as a “critical priority.” The mandate also extends to fraud against benefit and grant programs: student loans, childcare, veterans’ benefits, nutritional assistance, disaster relief, and small business programs.

Health Care. With national health care expenditures projected to grow substantially, and an estimated 3–10% of that spending lost to fraud, NFED says it will pursue health care fraud “by supercharging the historically successful Health Care Fraud Strike Force model with greater resources, data analytics support, and best-in-class technology.”

Internal Revenue. Criminal tax enforcement is now folded directly into NFED’s mandate, with a stated focus on unethical return preparers, income concealment, and abusive tax schemes, paired with data analytics and financial forensics.

Global Trade and Commerce. Operating alongside the existing cross-agency Trade Fraud Task Force, NFED will prioritize illicit transshipment schemes, country-of-origin fraud, undervaluation of imports, sanctions evasion, and forced labor in supply chains.

Corporate Misconduct. NFED also aims to hold accountable corporations that flaunt the law while rewarding those that voluntarily self-disclose misconduct to DOJ, cooperate with investigations into individual misconduct, and remediate wrongdoing. It also refers generally to “the Department’s policies concerning the prosecution of organizations” and describes a “strong pipeline of ongoing corporate matters.”

Read individually, these priorities track DOJ’s historical enforcement agenda. Read together, and against the infrastructure DOJ is building to pursue them, they point to a more fundamental shift in how fraud cases will originate — and that shift is the part worth spending time on.

A Data-Driven Enforcement Model

NFED’s buildout includes its own National Fraud Detection Center, identified on the organizational chart accompanying the memorandum, and a cross-disciplinary team of data science experts. AAG McDonald’s memorandum states that the Fraud Division has established new partnerships, “breaking down data barriers and eliminating silos in pursuit of more efficient and effective fraud detection and prosecution,” and that its analytic capabilities will allow DOJ to “identify tax misconduct earlier.” Paired with the Division’s commitment to “cutting-edge data analysis” in health care and its trade and customs mandate, we read this as an intent by DOJ to generate more cases from the Fraud Division’s own analysis of pricing, billing, reimbursement, tax, and customs data, rather than relying on whistleblower complaints, referrals, or self-reports.

That changes who is likely to catch a problem first. Historically, most fraud investigations began with an external prompt — an employee complaint, a competitor’s tip, a routine audit, an investigative journalist’s question — which gave companies a reasonable runway to investigate internally and weigh voluntary disclosure before DOJ got involved. A centralized division with its own detection infrastructure could shorten that runway considerably. Companies that wait for an external trigger before reviewing their own data may find DOJ has already reviewed it.

DOJ’s analytics are not the only channel to watch. NFED’s detection infrastructure sits alongside the Department’s Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program, which pays individuals for original information about corporate misconduct and was expanded again as recently as July 30, 2026, to broaden eligibility. The practical effect is that potential misconduct may surface from a financially motivated tipster on one side, and from DOJ’s own review of a company’s data on the other — concurrently, and without the company necessarily knowing which channel got there first.

This same dynamic is reshaping how DOJ treats conduct that has traditionally been considered regulatory rather than criminal. Trade and customs compliance is the clearest example: Country-of-origin classification, valuation, and transshipment routing have long been managed as administrative matters, but now sit squarely inside a criminal fraud division’s mandate. Companies that have staffed these functions accordingly should take a fresh look.

How NFED Differs From Past Reorganizations

DOJ has consolidated fraud enforcement before, including through the Corporate Fraud Task Force and the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force formed after the 2008 financial crisis. Both were interagency coordination bodies layered on top of existing components, and both eventually wound down as enforcement priorities shifted. NFED is built differently: rather than coordinating existing sections from above, it has absorbed entire sections — tax, health care fraud, and now trade fraud — directly into a single chain of command, with its own dedicated leadership, staffing targets, and detection infrastructure.

Making Sense of All the Change

The NFED announcement, paired with the Criminal Division’s renaming of its Fraud Section to the “White Collar and Corporate Enforcement Section,” suggests a reinvigorated intent to prosecute white-collar crime despite the conventional wisdom that white-collar enforcement has receded under this administration. How this reorganization ultimately impacts the volume and types of fraud cases initiated will be important to follow in the months ahead. 

It is important for clients to remember that regardless of the level of criminal enforcement, the types of cases DOJ continues to pursue do have similarities to those brought in the past. On August 6, 2026, a jury in the Eastern District of New York convicted Asante Kwako Berko, a former Goldman Sachs executive, of FCPA conspiracy, a substantive FCPA violation, and money laundering conspiracy for orchestrating a scheme to pay more than $1 million in bribes to Ghanaian officials in connection with a power-plant deal for Aksa Enerji, a Turkish energy company. The hallmarks were entirely familiar: shell companies, sham invoices, personal email, and lies to Goldman’s internal compliance team. The case was prosecuted by the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section — now the White Collar and Corporate Enforcement Section — working with the Eastern District of New York. Whatever the ultimate effect of the reorganization, we do expect many of the previous charging theories and trial playbook to remain the same.

What This Means for You

Our take is that NFED’s most immediate effect is on how DOJ finds fraud and which component prosecutes it, more than on the conduct DOJ will charge. The practical consequences are for detection, exposure, and timing: Companies should expect DOJ to reach the data sooner, should know whether their revenue sits in NFED’s priority areas, and should decide earlier how they intend to respond.

• Build a compliance function that can spot the flags first. NFED’s detection model rewards companies whose own monitoring surfaces pricing, billing, reimbursement, tax, and customs anomalies before the government does; a compliance program that can identify and escalate those patterns internally preserves the ability to investigate, remediate, and control the timing of any disclosure.
• Companies that depend on government funds should be especially vigilant. NFED’s mandate is oriented toward fraud against the public fisc — procurement, benefit and grant programs, health care reimbursement, tax, and trade — so government and defense contractors, grant recipients, and health care providers sit at the center of the resource surge and should assume heightened scrutiny of pricing, billing, and reimbursement practices.
• Revisit trade and customs compliance with a criminal lens. Country-of-origin, valuation, transshipment, sanctions, and forced-labor issues are now the focus of a newly established National Fraud Enforcement Division whose specific priorities are designed to tackle them. Companies with trade and customs issues should ensure that their regulatory and legal teams are well-resourced and dedicated to comply with applicable laws and regulations.
• Reassess the self-disclosure calculus and build the record early. Evaluate the Department’s stated incentives for voluntary self-disclosure, cooperation, and remediation against the shorter window NFED’s detection capabilities create.
• Do not read the reorganization as a reprieve or a clean boundary. Charging theories and trial practice continue, as the recent Berko FCPA trial shows, and the initial surge is largely a reassignment of existing Department resources. Corporate misconduct will sit on both sides of the reorganization, so track which DOJ component takes ownership of matters touching public and private interests.

Looking Ahead

DOJ has said NFED will keep growing over the next two years, and the August 18, 2026 final rule gives the Attorney General flexibility to assign additional matters to the Fraud Division as its footprint expands. We expect the boundary between NFED, the White Collar and Corporate Enforcement Section, and the rest of the Department to continue to evolve, and we will continue to track developments and update clients as DOJ’s approach becomes clearer in practice.

Please contact any of the attorneys below, or your regular V&E contact, with questions about how these developments may affect your organization.

This information is provided by Vinson & Elkins LLP for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended, nor should it be construed, as legal advice.