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White-collar Crime

 The term "white-collar crime" refers to financially motivated, nonviolent or non directly violent crime committed by individuals, businesses and government professionals. It was first defined by the sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939 as "a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation." Typical white-collar crime includes wage theft, fraud, bribery, Ponzi scheme, inside trading, labor racketeering, embezzlement, cybercrime, copyright infringement, money laundering, identity theft, and forgery. White-collar crime overlaps with corporate crime.


Modern criminology prefers to classify the type of crime and the topic:
  • By the type of offense, e.g., property crime, economic crime, and other corporate crimes like environmental and health, and safety law violations. Some crime is only possible because of the identity of the offender, e.g., transnational money laundering requires the participation of senior officers employed in banks. But the FBI has adapted a narrow approach, defining white-collar crime as "those illegal acts which are characterized by deceit, concealment, or violation of trust and which are not dependent upon the application or threat of physicial force or violence" (1989, 3). While the true extent and cost of white-collar crime are unknown, the FBI and the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimate the annual cost to the United States to fall between $300 to $660 billion.
  • By the type of offender, e.g., by social class or high socioeconomic status, the occupation of positions of trust or profession, or academic qualification, researching the motivations for criminal behavior, e.g., greed or fear of loss of face if economic difficulties become obvious. Shover and Wright point to the essential neutrality of a crime as enacted in a statute. It almost inevitably describes conduct in the abstract, not by reference to the character of the persons performing it. Thus, the only way that one crime differs from another is in the backgrounds and characteristics of its perpetrators.
  • By organizational culture rather than the offender or offense which overlaps with corporate crime. Appelbaum and Chambliss offer a two fold definition: (a) Occupational crime which occurs when crimes are committed to promote personal interests, say, by altering records and overcharging, or by the cheating of clients by professionals; (b) Organizational or corporate crime which occurs when corporate executives commit criminal acts to benefit their company by overcharging, or price fixing, false advertising, etc. 
In the United States, sentences for white-collar crimes may include a combination of imprisonment, fines, restitution, community service, disgorgement, probation, or other alternative punishment. These punishments grew harsher after the Jeffrey Skilling and Enron scandal, when the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was passed by the US Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush, defining new crimes and increasing the penalties for crimes such as mail and wire fraud. Sometimes, punishment for these crimes could be hard to determine due to the fact that convincing the courts that what the offender has done is challenging within itself. In other countries, such as China, white-collar criminals can be given the death penalty under aggravating circumstances, yet some countries have a maximum of 10 to 25 years of imprisonment. Certain countries like Canada consider the relationship between the parties to be a significant feature on sentence when there is breach of trust component involved. Questions about sentencing disparity in white-collar crime continue to be debated. The FBI, concerned with identifying the type of offense, collects annual statistical information on only three categories: fraud, counterfeiting/forgery,  and embezzlement. All other types of white-collar crimes are listed in a "miscellaneous" category.

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This Chapter is sponsored by Cartier Men's Watch.

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