Region's top IRS law enforcement officer hiring at least 20 agents

One of Ron Loecker’s two majors in college, at the University of South Dakota, was accounting. But it was the other major — criminal justice — that held his career aspirations. 

Turns out he's used both majors in what’s been nearly 25 years in the IRS criminal investigation unit. After stops from Denver to Dallas and California to the U.S. Virgin Islands, Loecker was recently promoted: in June he was named special agent in charge of the Tampa IRS Criminal Investigation office. He was assistant special agent in charge in the Tampa office from 2019 to 2023, then did a brief stint in Washington, D.C. “I had a career goal of one day becoming an agent in charge and being able to do it here, where I wanted to stay in Tampa, is really a dream,” he says. 

The office has a wide geography, stretching from Fort Myers to Jacksonville and across the Panhandle to Pensacola, which encompasses the U.S. Middle and Northern Districts of Florida. Loecker, in his role, is responsible for planning, directing and evaluating activities of personnel who conduct criminal investigations into tax violations and financial crimes.

“When I was a young man, the IRS wasn't the one on my list,” Loecker says. Instead it was being a federal agent, without a focus on a specific agency. But he quickly realized he had an advantage with the accounting side of his degree. “I was applying anywhere and everywhere I could to get into the federal side and (the IRS) came knocking,” he says. “And it has been awesome ever since. My accounting, criminal justice double major fit nicely with the IRS.”

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In an office with 58 agents and some 80 employees, much of the work Loecker is in charge of now is administrative in nature — especially in one of his primary goals: hiring at least 20 more agents for the understaffed office. 

But in a recent interview he showed some of the in–the-trenches investigative zeal that marked the early parts of his career, where he led investigations that put away several fraudsters who ran multimillion-dollar scams in California and Texas. ”Sitting here today, I’m still proud that a few of my (investigative) targets remain in jail and will be so well after I retire,” he says. “It gives me some pride to know thousands of these victims from these Ponzi schemes are better off because of the work I did.”

In a recent interview with the Business Observer, Loecker talked about his career, his role in the criminal investigative unit and what the business community can expect from his office. Edited excerpts: 

What are the primary investigative focus areas of your office? 

Doing some data analytics and finding high-net-worth tax evaders. Now, those don't grow on trees, right? If they were so easy to find, that's what we'd all be working on. But there's kind of a debate going on in the agency right now about just how do we do that? What does that look like? What is it going to take for manpower? 

Not saying it's easy to find any tax evader, but federal sentencing guidelines recently came out and changed the sentencing to anything with a $250,000 or less tax loss is going to have a potentially home confinement (sentence) as opposed to incarceration. So our challenge is that we don't want to work cases just to have someone sit at home; that (doesn’t) send a good message to the American taxpayer, that they can be audited and sit at home and still make payments and owe restitution. 

So our goal is to find high-impact cases, and then brag about them. So taxpayers do feel like, ‘oh, good, yeah, these are bad guys scamming the Treasury, the military and all the things we get out of taxes. And I pay mine. I want them to pay theirs.’ It’s a goal is to find these cases that will make the news in your publication or elsewhere, the nightly news or whatever else so everyone sees and hears that, that individuals are going to jail for tax evasion. 

How does your office find these cases and alleged criminal conduct beyond data analytics? 

We are open to hearing from anybody in the community when they see others getting a competitive advantage by breaking the tax laws…also (some comes from) partnering with all of our other agencies. We have mandates to get involved in narcotics investigations. We're the only agency that 100% does financial investigations. The DEA does some financials when it relates to their drugs. The FBI gets a lot of different things, but not all financials. That's all we do. 

So when you bring us in to dive into someone's financial history that's what we do. If you want us to dive into the drug dealers you're investigating, we will figure out where he's laundering his money. If it's a public corruption case and there's a public official taking bribes to award contracts, or whatever it might be, we'll dive in and figure out where his extra money is coming from and how he took that bribe. Health care fraud, go down the list. We don't have many examples here, but I still think with the amount of military, we should have more procurement fraud cases of folks messing with the military.

The shortage of IRS agents, criminal and civil, has been a national topic for several years. How does that impact the work you do and would like to do here? 

Obviously, everyone heard the news that the (IRS was going to hire) 88,000 armed agents, right? (He chuckled sarcastically.) Certainly that's not the case, but the Criminal Investigation Division is hiring. We've got some allocation to grow. We were at 3,000 Special Agents (nationwide) back in 2010 and we were at times over the last several years below 2,000 or right there. So obviously the population in the United States has grown tremendously over those 10-15 years, and we're down a third. 

In no way weighing into the political discussion about that, but I think anyone can see that's not going to be sustainable if you want to have some fairness in the way in which we're going to apply the criminal laws to tax evasion, because you don't want it to be a complete shake of the dice, right? It should be generally understood if I go too far down that road, I'm now opening myself up to criminal IRS investigations. 

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What are some of the biggest challenges facing you and this office the rest of 2024 and into 2025? 

Hiring is a big point. We have to get some bodies in here. We have got to right-size the office. And I think we can do that by growing into maybe in the 80s for agents. We have to get the word out about that. No doubt, the IRS has a stigma. Hasn't been exactly popular the last few years, although I don't know if there's a time in history anyone loved the IRS. It's just the nature of the beast, and we own that. (A new agent for the office, says Loecker, has been hired and is completing a six-month training program, which will bring the total to 59 agents.)

How do you compete with job offers that can be more lucrative in the private sector when recruiting criminal investigators with accounting degrees?

I can't promise (more money), but the rewarding career that I've had, I'll battle that with anybody out there. It's been fantastic, 100% putting bad guys away. It's been great. I can go on the federal prison finder right now and find some guys who are sitting there still today because of what I did years ago. It's very rewarding.

When you think about goals, challenges, obstacles, what keeps you up at night when you think about the future of this office? 

Last year we had in Phoenix an agent killed in the line of duty. That would be tough. We don't do a lot of that. But it obviously could happen anywhere, anytime. How are we to patrol that? We're working on a lot of drug cases. We're working a lot of what someone might consider more true crime. But even if you take a tax case, take a guy who is living his life, you don't know if he's saying, ‘I'm never going to go to jail for this.’ We go knock on a lot of doors and you never know what's on the other side of that door.