[11] The IPN's main areas of activity,[6] in line with its original mission statement,[2] include researching and documenting the losses which were suffered by the Polish Nation as a result of World War II and during the post-war totalitarian period.

[2] The IPN informs about the patriotic traditions of resistance against the occupational forces,[2] and the Polish citizens' fight for sovereignty of the nation, including their efforts in defence of freedom and human dignity in general.

[2] Its mission includes the need to compensate for damages which were suffered by the repressed and harmed people at a time when human rights were disobeyed by the state,[2] and educate the public about recent history of Poland.

[6] IPN collects, organises and archives all documents about the Polish Communist security apparatus active from 22 July 1944 to 31 December 1989.

[4] By the same law, the institution's mission statement was changed to include "protecting the reputation of the Republic of Poland and the Polish Nation".

Prior to 2016, the election of the director was a complex procedure, which involves the selection of a panel of candidates by the IPN Collegium (members appointed by the Polish Parliament and judiciary).

In response, Kamiński implemented several changes, including organizing public debates with outside historians to counter the charge of isolationism and has suggested refocusing on victims as opposed to agents.

The Main Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (Główna Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni Przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu) is the oldest component of the IPN tracing its origins to 1945.

[21] However, several articles of the 2006-7 amendments were held unconstitutional by Poland's Constitutional Court on 11 May 2007,[22] though the IPN's lustration power was still wider than under the original 1997 law.

This vaguely defined role allowed Paweł Machcewicz, BEP's director in 2000, freedom to create a wide range of activities.

[31] The Bulletin contains: popular-scientific and academic articles, polemics, manifestos, appeals to readers, promotional material on the IPN and BEP, denials and commentary on reports in the news, as well as multimedia supplements.

[31] The IPN has issued several board games to help educate people about recent Polish history, including: In 2008, the chairman of the IPN wrote to local administrations, calling for the addition of the word "German" before "Nazi" to all monuments and tablets commemorating Germany's victims, stating that "Nazis" is not always understood to relate specifically to Germans.

According to Georges Mink [fr], common criticisms of the IPN include its dominance in the Polish research field, which is guaranteed by a budget that far supersedes that of any similar academic institution; the "thematic monotony ... of micro-historical studies ... of no real scientific interest" of its research; its focus on "martyrology"; and various criticisms of methodology and ethics.

He added that in recent years that problem is being ameliorated as the IPN's work "has somewhat diversified as its administration has taken note of criticism on the part of academics.

He puts the IPN research, in a broad sense, in the former; he states that "[a] solid, workshop-oriented, traditional, and positivist historiography ... which defends itself by the integrity of its analysis and its diversified source base" but criticizes its approach for leading to a "falsely conceived mission to find 'objective truth' at the expense of 'serious study of event history', and a 'simplified claim that only 'secret' sources, not accessible to ordinary mortals', can lead to that objective truth."

... [Meanwhile, in the IPN] thick volumes are being produced, into which are being thrown, with no real consideration, further evidence in criminating various persons now deceased (and therefore not able to defend themselves), and elderly people still alive – known and unknown.

[41]: 67 During PiS's control of the government between 2005 and 2007, the IPN was the focus of heated public controversies, in particular in regard to the pasts of Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa and PZPR secretary Wojciech Jaruzelski.

[44] The book's premise was that in the 1970s the Solidarity leader and later president of Poland Lech Wałęsa was a secret informant of the Polish Communist Security Service.

When he was promoted to a regional director of the Wrocław branch in February 2021, his past came to media attention and resulted in criticism of Greniuch and IPN.

[29] Historian Dariusz Stola states that the IPN is very bureaucratic in nature, comparing it to a "regular continental European bureaucracy, with usual deficiencies of its kind", and posits that in this aspect the IPN resembles the former Communist institutions it is supposed to deal with, equally "bureaucratic, centralist, heavy, inclined to extensive growth and quantity rather than quality of production".

The list gained much attention in Polish media and politics, and IPN security procedures and handling of the matter came under criticism.