The Justice Department rarely hands compliance officers a document that spells out its enforcement priorities this directly, but that’s essentially what Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald did this week in a memo to staff of the newly formed National Fraud Enforcement Division. The memo is worth reading in full, because it functions less like an internal org chart announcement and more like a public roadmap of where DOJ intends to point its fraud enforcement resources over the next several years.

A New Division, Built for Scale and Speed

The National Fraud Enforcement Division is being staffed up to roughly 500 attorneys and support personnel this month, with resources reallocated from other parts of the Department to build it out. McDonald described the design philosophy in explicit terms: a division built to be “lean, flat and agile,” with reduced bureaucratic layers so that career prosecutors, deployed alongside U.S. Attorneys’ Offices around the country, can move directly from investigation to charging decisions. That structural choice matters. A flatter, faster-moving enforcement division with dedicated privilege review teams, data science capability, and automated litigation support is built specifically to shorten the time between identifying a fraud pattern and bringing a case.

This division is distinct from, but will work closely with, the Department’s White Collar and Corporate Enforcement Section, the group recently renamed from what had been the Fraud Section. That renaming, paired with the creation of this new division, reflects a deliberate structural separation: one team focused on traditional corporate and white-collar prosecution, and a separate, larger, resource-heavy division built specifically around fraud detection and enforcement at scale, spanning far more territory than corporate misconduct alone.

Where the Division Will Actually Focus

The scope described in the memo is broad by design, covering public trust, healthcare, tax administration, global trade and commerce, and corporate misconduct. Within healthcare, the memo specifically calls out marketing practices for unsafe products and services that deceive consumers, a signal that healthcare fraud enforcement is not limited to billing and reimbursement schemes but extends to how products and services are marketed to the public in the first place.

The trade and customs component deserves particular attention, because the memo names its priorities with unusual specificity: illicit transshipment schemes, country-of-origin fraud, undervaluation of imported goods to evade duties, sanctions evasion, and foreign forced labor schemes. This is not vague language about “trade enforcement.” It is a direct list of the exact fact patterns the division intends to pursue, and it lines up precisely with enforcement trends we have already been tracking on this blog: the record customs-related False Claims Act recoveries earlier this year, the growing use of the FCA against tariff circumvention, and the accelerating focus on forced labor risk in cross-border supply chains. Naming this division as the lead on the Department’s criminal enforcement strategy for trade and customs, rather than treating it as a secondary priority, tells you how seriously DOJ intends to pursue it.

Context: A Deliberate Reallocation, Not a Retreat

This memo lands against a backdrop that has generated real confusion in the compliance community. Traditional FCPA enforcement has visibly slowed under the current administration; the Department has issued only one foreign bribery deferred prosecution agreement this year, the $10 million Scoular settlement over bribes paid to Mexican officials, itself notable because prosecutors tied the underlying conduct to cartel activity rather than framing it as a conventional bribery case. It would be easy to read that slowdown as evidence that DOJ is broadly stepping back from corporate enforcement.

This memo is strong evidence against that reading. What has actually happened is a reallocation, not a retreat. Resources that might once have gone toward traditional bribery and corruption casework are now flowing into a purpose-built division chasing trade fraud, healthcare marketing deception, tax fraud, and forced labor schemes, with headcount, technology, and structural independence to match. The administration has also stood up fraud.gov, a public-facing website tracking enforcement activity, explicitly framed as part of a “relentless war” on fraud. Companies that interpret a quieter FCPA docket as a quieter DOJ overall are misreading the moment.

Why the Trade and Forced Labor Emphasis Matters

The specificity of the trade and customs priorities in this memo should be read alongside the broader tariff and forced labor enforcement environment already taking shape this year: the USTR’s Section 301 tariffs tied to forced labor practices across dozens of trading partners, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act’s rebuttable presumption, and the DOJ’s own Trade Fraud Task Force, which has already produced the largest customs-related False Claims Act recovery in history. This new division doesn’t introduce a new risk category so much as it institutionalizes and resources an enforcement priority that was already accelerating. Companies engaged in cross-border trade, particularly those with any exposure to transshipment routes, country-of-origin documentation, or supply chains touching regions with known forced labor risk, should treat this memo as confirmation that scrutiny in this area is not a temporary enforcement wave. It now has a dedicated, well-staffed division built to sustain it.

Compliance Takeaways

A few practical implications follow directly from this announcement.

Trade compliance needs to sit inside the core enterprise risk assessment, not as an adjunct to customs operations. A dedicated federal division with data science capability and automated litigation support pursuing transshipment schemes, country-of-origin fraud, and duty evasion is a different level of scrutiny than a customs desk reviewing paperwork. Companies should assume their trade documentation and country-of-origin certifications will be tested with real analytical rigor.

Healthcare marketing practices are now an explicit enforcement target, not just billing and coding compliance. Companies marketing healthcare products and services should revisit whether their consumer-facing claims can withstand scrutiny for deceptive marketing, independent of whatever reimbursement or billing compliance controls are already in place.

Forced labor due diligence and trade compliance are converging into a single enforcement lens. The memo’s decision to list forced labor schemes alongside transshipment and country-of-origin fraud, rather than as a separate category, reflects how closely these risks are now linked in practice, and compliance programs should reflect that same integration rather than managing them as separate workstreams.

Don’t mistake a slower FCPA docket for a slower DOJ. The Department has simply moved its investment toward a different set of priorities, with more resources and better tools than before. Companies should update their own risk assessments to reflect where the enforcement energy is actually going, not where it used to be.