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On August 13, 2026, Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald issued a memo entitled The Fraud Division’s Enforcement Priorities to all personnel of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) new National Fraud Enforcement Division. As the title suggests, the memo sets out the division’s enforcement priorities. While the memo doesn’t break new ground, it highlights further the industries and areas where companies should expect the most enforcement scrutiny.

National Fraud Enforcement Division

The National Fraud Enforcement Division was created earlier this year and is scaling quickly. According to the memo, headcount is set to hit roughly 500 attorneys and staff by August 24, 2026, with continued growth planned over the next two years. It’s organized into specialized sections covering healthcare fraud, public trust/financial integrity, tax, global trade, corporate enforcement, and more, backed by asset recovery, data science, and litigation support teams. The memo’s stated design goal for the division is to be “lean, flat, and agile” — fewer bureaucratic layers between prosecutors and charging decisions.

While there have been many task forces, cross-agency initiatives, and partnerships in the past, the division still represents a significant investment of resources. And more resources mean more investigations, opened faster, with better data analytics behind them.

Five Priority Areas and What They Mean for Businesses

The memo describes five areas prioritized for fraud enforcement:

1. Public trust and financial integrity

    Government procurement fraud (bid rigging, defective pricing, self-dealing, bribery) and benefit/grant program fraud (student loans, veterans’ benefits, disaster relief, small business programs) are explicit priorities. If your organization touches federal contracts or federally funded programs, expect to be on DOJ’s radar.

    2. Healthcare

    Healthcare is already the most targeted industry for enforcement actions. For example, it regularly accounts for over 80% of all False Claims Act judgments and settlements, and there is robust criminal enforcement based on the Anti-Kickback Statute, healthcare fraud and other statutes.

    The memo sharpens the focus on the healthcare industry. It singles out telemedicine, Medicare and Medicaid billing, controlled substance diversion, and home health and hospice arrangements. None of this is new, but the memo promises more resources and more tools to the long-standing and successful Health Care Fraud Strike Force model, which should result in more investigations.

    Healthcare clients are well acquainted with compliance and fraud-and-abuse issues. Nonetheless, companies and providers — including smaller practices that may not be as well-versed in these issues — should revisit billing compliance, kickback exposure (AKS/Stark), and telehealth arrangements.

    3. Internal revenue

    Criminal tax enforcement is folded into the division’s mandate, targeting unethical return preparers, income concealment, and abusive tax shelter promoters. The memo contemplates closer coordination between tax and other fraud charges, creating what it terms “an all-tools response to fraud enforcement.” Companies and individuals ensnared in financial investigations or white-collar schemes are more likely to face additional tax-related charges arising from the same conduct.

    4. Global trade and commerce

    A dedicated Trade Fraud Task Force will pursue transshipment schemes, country-of-origin fraud, customs undervaluation, sanctions evasion, and forced-labor supply chain issues. Importers and multinational supply chains should audit customs declarations and supplier due diligence.

    5. Corporate misconduct

    The memo reaffirms the carrot-and-stick approach: The division rewards voluntary self-disclosure, cooperation, and remediation, while pursuing organizations that don’t. This is consistent with existing DOJ corporate enforcement policy, not a new framework, but signals the policy will be applied by a better-resourced team.

    Takeaways

    None of these priority areas is new to fraud enforcement, but the memo signals more prosecutors, more data-driven case selection, and faster charging decisions across all of them. For companies and individuals, especially those in regulated industries, the memo suggests several steps to take:

    • Compliance stress tests – Businesses, especially those in the priority areas, should review their compliance infrastructure — and whether it’s actually being used as intended. Better to test it now than have it tested by a government investigation later.
    • Know your data – Data analytics, in this initiative and others at DOJ, are increasingly how billing outliers are identified and how investigations get opened. Companies should be leveraging their own data analytics to spot problems themselves first and to use that data to their advantage in the event of an investigation.
    • Revisit whistleblower protocols – While the memo does not refer to whistleblowers specifically, there is no question that whistleblowers play an enormous role in fraud enforcement, both civil and criminal. Companies with strong internal reporting protocols (and a culture that encourages such reporting) will have a decided advantage in avoiding government scrutiny. A defined protocol for handling whistleblowers also minimizes the likelihood of missteps when an issue does arise.
    • Know when to get help – While companies can do much on their own, they should know when to call on experienced counsel to help. Whether that’s to conduct an investigation under the cloak of the attorney-client privilege or to respond to a government inquiry, when the stakes are high, there’s no replacement for experienced enforcement counsel.