So extensive was the speculation habitually printed alongside the details of ongoing inquiries that the Home Office referred prosecution barristers to the newspapers for the details of their brief.
I'm singling out IRS-referred prosecutions because the agency has suffered enormous budget cuts, leading it to lose about a third of its enforcement agents since 2010.
But the Homeland Security Department interpreted it as meaning they would no longer refer for prosecution the cases of adults illegally crossing the U.S. border with children because of to a lack of space at existing facilities for housing detained families.
According to the law that created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the panel has a responsibility to refer for prosecution any evidence of lawbreaking.
The ABS said it had referred 667 prosecutions to the commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions since 1990.
"We will not hesitate to send a message," he said, referring to prosecutions, "if we have found false certification".
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Richard Hudson, the deputy chief of the operations program at Customs and Border Protection, told lawmakers that between May 6 and May 19, 638 adults had been referred for prosecutions under the new "zero-tolerance" effort.
And out of more than 76,000 firearms purchases denied by the federal instant check system, only 62 were referred for prosecution and only 44 were actually prosecuted.
Of those, seven have been referred for prosecution.
