CORCA Is the Right Start on Organized Retail Crime

The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA) is the most serious federal attempt yet to confront the criminal enterprises that move stolen goods across state lines, through online marketplaces, and into illicit financial networks. The House version of the bill (H.R.2853) was advanced unanimously by the Judiciary Committee in January 2026 and passed the House this week.

The legislation does two important things. First, it modernizes Title 18—the section of the U.S. Code that defines federal crimes and criminal procedure—to give federal prosecutors workable tools for addressing organized retail crime (ORC): 

• It extends interstate-transport theft statutes to cover anyone using a “facility of interstate or foreign commerce,” which includes the online platforms increasingly used to move stolen goods. 
• It allows prosecutors to aggregate thefts totaling $5,000 or more across a 12-month period so that strings of smaller thefts tied to the same network can be charged as a single federal case.
• It adds cargo and stolen-goods offenses to the federal money-laundering statute, meaning prosecutors can now pursue money-laundering charges against people who clean the proceeds of those thefts—an important tool for reaching the financiers and organizers behind a network rather than just the people doing the stealing. 

Second, the bill directs the Department of Homeland Security to establish an Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center within Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) to align federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal efforts. The center fills a longstanding operational gap, giving federal investigators a single venue for intelligence sharing, investigative coordination, industry partnership, and pattern-tracking across cases. 

The Right Level of Government for the Right Kind of Crime

Routine retail theft (i.e., the individual shoplifter or the local smash-and-grab) is a state and local matter, and it should stay that way. These offenses are well within the capacity of state criminal codes and local law enforcement, which is why more than 30 states have enacted ORC-specific laws of their own and continue to refine aggregation thresholds, prosecutorial tools, and sentencing at the state level. CORCA does not change any of that; it is not a federal takeover of street-level theft enforcement, and it should not become one. 

What CORCA does instead is recognize that a different kind of crime has outgrown state-by-state enforcement: organized, multi-state criminal enterprises that no single jurisdiction can investigate or prosecute on its own. Boosters (the people who do the stealing) recruited in one state hand off goods to fences (the middlemen who resell them) in another, who move merchandise through online sellers in a third state, with proceeds routed offshore. When stolen goods cross state lines and proceeds move through interstate financial channels, the case stops being a state problem in any practical sense. That is where CORCA comes in.

The Scale of the Cross-Jurisdictional Problem

The cargo side of the bill illustrates why federal involvement is now necessary. Estimated cargo theft losses across the United States and Canada surged to nearly $725 million in 2025—a 60 percent increase over 2024—as organized criminal groups increasingly focused on high-value shipments. The average value per theft rose to $273,990—up 36 percent from the prior year. Confirmed cargo theft incidents rose 18 percent year over year. These are not opportunistic crimes by individuals; they are sophisticated supply-chain operations involving identity theft, fraudulent pickups, posing as fictitious carriers, and cyber-enabled logistics manipulation.

A theft involving a shipment originating in California, diverted in Texas, and resold through online platforms in three other states is, by definition, a federal matter. State prosecutors must navigate slow, case-by-case interstate cooperation processes to reach evidence in other jurisdictions, and state agencies face challenges when trying to coordinate evidence-sharing across borders the way a federal center can. CORCA’s coordination center is designed to do what no individual state can: provide a single point of contact, intelligence-sharing infrastructure, and case-coordination authority for crimes that move across the country and around the world.

Why CORCA’s Polycriminal Framing Matters

The strongest argument for federal involvement is the fact that organized retail and cargo theft groups are polycriminal—meaning the same networks also engage in drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, human smuggling, and money laundering. These are not separate criminal categories that just happen to share personnel; rather, they are integrated enterprises in which retail and cargo theft generate revenue that funds other criminal operations and provides cover for transnational illicit activity. 

That integration is fundamentally beyond the reach of local and state law enforcement—exactly the kind of cross-jurisdictional, cross-categorical threat that federal agencies exist to investigate. As San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2025, prosecutors are making progress on individual cases but “have not been able to break through to what is going on nationally.” An April 2025 letter of support from the National District Attorneys Association made the same point in operational terms: Prosecutors must be able to “connect the dots and track the entire criminal syndicate from the ground level booster to the fences and criminal heads.” CORCA provides this framework.

The Case for CORCA and What Comes Next

With the passage of H.R.2853, attention now turns to the Senate. Statutory updates are overdue, and the predicate-offense additions are technically sound. A coordination center staffed by HSI special agents and analysts—along with detailees from the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the U.S. Secret Service; the U.S. Postal Inspection Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration; and U.S. Customs and Border Protection—is a defensible structural choice. Additionally, the seven-year sunset and annual reporting requirements give Congress meaningful oversight to determine whether the center is producing results.

What CORCA does not (and should not) do is reach down into the state and local enforcement of routine retail theft. That work continues to belong to state legislatures, state and local prosecutors, and local police departments. The federal role is to provide interstate authority, multi-agency coordination, and investigative tools to confront the organized, cross-border criminal enterprises that no state can pursue alone. CORCA should strengthen state-level work by giving state and local partners a federal counterpart equipped to take on the cases that exceed their reach.

The House has done its part, and now the Senate should follow. After that, the harder work begins—staffing the center, building partnerships, and holding the new authority to reporting and oversight standards built into the bill.