Skip to main content

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.

x---------x

This Chapter is sponsored by Cartier Men's Watch.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Joint Meetings of the Australian Parliament

 A joint meeting of the Australian Parliament is a convening of members of the Senate and House of Representatives sitting together as a single legislative body. Australia has a bicameral federal Parliament, consisting of the Senate and House of Representatives. Subject to the Constitution of Australia, each House has its own rules, standing orders and procedures, its own presiding officer, and meets separately, at dates and times it alone decides. However, there are some occasions when the two Houses have come together as a single body. Unlike the Opening of Parliament which is officially made by the Governor-General at the Senate premises, the joint sessions are held at the House of Representatives chamber. The reasons of joint meetings have included: To resolve deadlocks between the Houses following the trigger of a double dissolution To fill casual vacancies in the representation of the territories in the Senate A special commemorative joint sitting to Celebrate the Centenary o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage

 Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage or the Virgin of Antipolo is a seventeenth century Roman Catholic wooden image of the Blessed Virgin Mary as venerated in the Philippines. This Black Madonna is enshrined in Antipolo Cathedral in the Sierra Madre mountains east of Metro Manila. The image was brought to the country by Governor-General Juan Niño de Tabora from Mexico via the galleon El Almirante  in 1626. His safe voyage across the Pacific Ocean was attributed to the image, which was then given the title "Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage." It was substantiated later by six other successful voyages of the Manila-Acapulco Galleons witb the image aboard as its patroness. Pope Pius XI issued a Pontifical decree to crown the image in 1925. The statue is one of the most celebrated Marian images in the Philippines, having mentioned by national martyr Jose Rizal in his writings. From May to July each year, the image attracts millions of pilgrims from all over the country and abroad. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Create a Richly Imagined World

For someone who likes fantasy and sci-fi fiction, most of the time, a lot of people ask me about how to create a richly imagined world. Fantasy and sci-fi elements rest heavily on how an author weave the setting and the world in which the heroes dwell in, and it helps to make the novel to be imagined vividly in the readers' minds. A convincing world should be relatable, something that we can associate ourselves with. For us to be associated with a world an author created in his mind, and wrote on the pages of a book, this world has to be close to the real thing. It has to be systematic, real and alive, and very convincing. A real world has certain elements, and an author must consider them in writing a vividly imagined world: Cartography - a fantasy or sci-fi world depend heavily on geography and maps, especially if the plot requires war and the belligerents occupy so much space in the plot. A convincing world has the world separated in territories, and every part of the...
Post a Comment
Read more