Fraud Schemes Related to Non-Work Authorized Populations

FinCEN’s Joint Advisory on Non-Work Authorized Populations and Their Employers and Risks to the Integrity of the U.S. Financial System (FIN-2026-A002) addresses fraud schemes to evade the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 which prohibits U.S. persons and/or entities …from knowingly hiring, or recruiting or referring for a fee, unlawful aliens for employment…. These include identity theft (i.e., accepting fraudulent identification documents) and payroll fraud (i.e., paying employees in cash or other “off the books” payments), particularly with respect to …agriculture, construction, domestic service, hospitality, or staffing industries.

The Advisory includes case studies and eighteen red flag indicators to help financial institutions detect such activity. A few of the red flags included a customer that:

• Works in the agriculture, construction, domestic service, hospitality, or staffing industries and opens a bank account with an ITIN with little to no transactional activity besides remittances to foreign jurisdictions;
• Has significant business operations and transactional activity but with little to no payroll activity commensurate to the customer’s profile; or,
• Is issuing recurring, large volumes of checks for under $1,000 that are made payable to a significant number of separate individuals who cash the checks.

Published 2026/07/16