With economic offences seeing an increase, the CBI has written to the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) to probe the growing number of white collar crimes.

"The CBI has already written to ICAI to provide expertise as and when required," says the new CBI Director Ashwani Kumar.

Kumar, a 1973 batch IPS officer from Himachal Pradesh cadre, who took command of the premier investigating agency on August two, says the CBI has been giving special attention to economic offences ever since the outbreak of the 1992 Harshad Mehta scam.

"We separated economic offences wing from general offences wing in 1992 and now we have full fledged five economic offences' wing functioning within the organisation," Kumar, 57, said here.

Recalling that the agency was not well equipped when the "stupendous task" of securities scam was handed over to the CBI in 1992, he said, "Today, we have such good officers in the CBI who can take up any case of bank fraud."

Now the agency is looking forward to have some chartered accountants who will coordinate with agency officials to probe the entire ramifications of economic offences