The Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing the American insurance industry to determine whether insurance fraud is “the next big one,” following the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and the corporate fraud scandals that began in 2001, officials said yesterday.

While not inspired by any specific company or crime, the inquiry covers the type of allegations that led to federal and New York State probes of American International Group, the world’s largest insurer, said Chris Swecker, who heads the FBI’s criminal division.

“We’re taking a hard look at cases like AIG to see if there’s an indication of something more pervasive,” Mr. Swecker said at a briefing for reporters in Washington on the status of financial crimes investigations. “I’m not going to say that [the insurance industry] is the next crisis, but I will say that we’re looking at it.”

An AIG spokesman, Chris Winans, declined to comment. The company said May 1 it would correct five years of earnings results for reinsurance and other transactions that inflated the company’s net worth by $2.7 billion. The chief executive, Maurice Greenberg, resigned in March.

In February, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the Securities and Exchange Commission began examining whether AIG had improperly used reinsurance. Since then, an internal review has uncovered misleading or improper booking of asset writedowns, hedge-fund proceeds, and underwriting results, AIG said.

An FBI report released at the briefing says the bureau’s review of the industry is focused on insurance-related corporate fraud, the diversion of policyholder premiums for the personal benefit of agents and brokers, and worker’s compensation frauds that target pools of small businesses. Reinsurance is also a topic of the review, the chief of the FBI’s financial crimes section, Brian Lamkin, said.

Messrs. Swecker and Lamkin declined to identify or describe any specific investigation.

Mr. Lamkin said history shows that “a lot of the accounting schemes in these large corporations also can be done in some other industries, like the insurance industry. We’re just taking a hard look at it.” The FBI report says there is “a recent trend involving insurance companies caught in the web” of corporate accounting schemes.

The FBI is working with state insurance commissioners on its industry review and recently joined the International Association of Insurance Fraud Agencies. Jeremy Wilkinson, a spokesman for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which represents state regulators, said the group has “an ongoing relationship with the FBI.”

A former federal prosecutor, Robert Mintz, said it’s unusual for the FBI to use such a “broad-based, industry-wide approach,” a technique more typical of Mr. Spitzer’s office.

“We may be seeing the FBI, to some extent, following the lead” of the New York attorney general, “which is really unusual,” Mr. Mintz said.

While many of the FBI’s 56 field offices are involved in the inquiry, Mr. Swecker said, the bureau decided to run it from the Washington headquarters to look broadly for “trends and patterns.”

Mr. Lamkin said investigators are looking for “a pattern within the industry and a practice of doing the same type of schemes.”

“This is exactly what we did during the 80s during the savings and loan crisis,” Mr. Lamkin said. “We had individual S&L investigations going on. What we identified were these side deals of exchanging bad loans back and forth between the institutions to hide them from regulators.”

Told to look out for such deals, FBI field offices began noticing them in other investigations, “and that’s what generated the whole national push,” Mr. Lamkin said.

Yesterday’s FBI report also predicts that cases of corporate fraud, the top priority of the bureau’s financial crimes section, “will continue to flourish.”

FBI field offices are now pursuing about 405 open cases around the U.S., double the number in September 2003. The open cases include those that have already led to some trials or convictions, such as Enron and WorldCom, Mr. Swecker said.

In addition, FBI offices open three to six new corporate fraud cases each month, the report says.