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A recent article on Bloomberg.com reported that the FBI has a new focus. Instead of covering the crimes they normally do, agents are being put to work combating mortgage fraud.

Bill Carter, an FBI spokesman in Washington, said the shift was made after an analysis of how agents are spending their time. The FBI traditionally has moved investigators to address urgent needs, he said. About 150 agents were working on more than 1,300 mortgage cases before the change.

``If you're seeing a significant crime problem, you have to move resources,'' Carter said yesterday. ``We've got a big problem with mortgage fraud.''

Agents are being pulled off other cases and being told not to open new ones.

The 26 field offices were told to temporarily suspend opening new cases dealing with price fixing, mass marketing, wire fraud, mail fraud and environmental crimes, Carter said. Current cases aren't being dropped, he said. The FBI has 56 field offices and about 12,000 agents.

Carter said the bureau is ``not walking away'' from pending investigations. ``We're just saying, `Don't open any new cases,''' he said.

The affected FBI offices are in states including Florida, Georgia, California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Minnesota, he said. All are considered mortgage fraud ``hot spots,'' he said.

The problem isn't that agents are being reassigned, it's that there are nowhere near enough of them to handle everything.

At the FBI, white-collar fraud became less of a priority when President George W. Bush ordered the agency to concentrate on national security after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Lawmakers have also criticized the Bush administration for reducing funding for crime fighting.

``It comes as no surprise that law enforcement is spread too thin to cover all the bases,'' Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat and member of the Judiciary Committee, which oversees the FBI, said in an e-mailed statement. ``Over the past several years, the administration has reassigned as many as 2,400 FBI agents from fighting crime to combating terrorism without replacing them.''