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# FDA Needs More Global Help Against Crime: Hermsen
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/fda-needs-more-global-help-against-crime-hermsen/
- Published: 2023-01-03T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T18:10:18.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: FDA Policy/General, #legacy-id-D5153451

FDA assistant commissioner for criminal investigations **Catherine Hermsen**, who retired at the end of 2022 after five years as the agency’s “top cop,” says she expects a greater focus in the future on multilateral collaboration to keep up with the ever-evolving transnational criminal groups. “FDA has been strengthening its relationships with foreign regulators for many years,” she said in a retirement [interview](https://www.fda.gov/international-programs/global-perspective/fdas-top-cop-adapting-challenges-globalization-and-e-commerce?ref=fdaweb.com), “but now I think we will start to see further broadening and diversifying of these relationships in the coming years…. This will allow us to address emerging public health concerns more efficiently and robustly from multiple angles and across commodities and product areas.”

Hermsen says that building viable criminal investigations has become more complicated as globalization and the Internet have “opened the doors for cases largely centered around bad actors operating out of other countries and illicit supply chains spanning multiple countries. All of these factors have grown increasingly more sophisticated and, in fact, they have metastasized.”

Asked about the impact of Internet sales, Hermsen said the transnational criminal groups misusing the Internet to distribute illicit FDA-regulated types of products are, at the highest levels, largely outside the U.S. She said the groups are extremely sophisticated and adept at exploiting mechanisms intended to promote legitimate commerce, such as free-trade zones, and are often associated with larger networks of related businesses profiting from this form of illicit trade such as those who process credit card payments and drop-shippers who send and receive shipments for the criminal groups.