Examining the Convenience of White-Collar Financial Crimes

Theory of Convenience in white collar crimes and encouraging factors

The theory of convenience is there to integrate all the theoretical elucidations regarding the occurrence of the white collar crimes from the aspects of psychology, sociology, management, criminology, organisational behaviour and many others and also sheds the light of various perspectives of convenience that people feel. Circumstances such as bankruptcy or its threat due to any huge financial loss is a frequent reason for the white collar crimes. Such type of cases can be seen like the case of Refco Inc., where the new CEO Philip R. Bennett was asked to leave the company by federal prosecutor accusing that he hide a debt of about $545 million and tried to keep it as a secret from investors. The case ended with Bennett sentenced to 16 years in prison as found guilty to the charges. After having 24 years of a quality record and helming two prominent ranks as CEO & CFO, this charge was considered as very high level white collar crime.

This case proved that a fraudulent criminal offense can occur in any scenario, after servicing for a long term period also. And one consistent fact is that there will always be a rigid disagreement in acceptance even if it was found & proved guilty. Another case proving disapproval of white collar financial offence even though with consistent denial is the incident of Darrin Campbell. He and his other executives were accused of failing to present the financial weaknesses of Tampa-based Anchor Glass Container Corporation (third-largest manufacturer of glass containers of USA) to the public and hence collapsed. Here also Campbell was rigid of not admitting his wrongdoing. As per the law portal, the fraud cases, money laundering matters, trading conspiracies to defraud and the false accounting matters comes under the Companies Act 2006 is only applied for businesses where such deviant behaviour or act is carried out. Other than this, the Enterprise Act 2002 prosecutes for the individuals who are involved in the white collar criminal cartels essentially for those who are dishonestly colluded.

In corporate hierarchy who are considered as the higher authorities often engage themselves in illegal and dishonest behaviour to accustom and insists on getting results rather than being moralistically correct. Clarke (2020) presented that this is the natural human tendency that if the leader or superior explicates and defines financial crimes as acceptable then the subordinates also tends to accept the deviant criminal behaviour.

People in corporate world find the white collar financial frauds as more attractive, simple and convenient option to neutralise their financial problems, issues and sometimes greed also. And this is another reason which brings criminal and fraud willingness behaviour to peer out in people as more convenient option to make money.

However, no such reason can bring any change in the proven fact that a white collar financial fraud are a heinous corporate crime in businesses and was found to be very on-going. Gottschalk and Gunnesdal (2018) opined that this is strongly believed that whether corporate crime or another crime, ever crime is illegal and cannot be approved from any corner whether they are considered convenient or tough.

Money laundering is also a corporate criminal offence which is implied as an illegal act of making huge amount of money through criminal activities like the frauds in businesses, illegitimate trafficking, illegal activity funding and so on. There are certain factors that make people feel that engaging in financial crimes is more convenient than other crimes such as money laundering. In big businesses, small money launderings are not identified and missed due to proper strategies and the small launderings encourages the individuals to conduct a big financial mess and monetary crisis. These could be reduced or avoided with better developed laws, acts and internal strategies.

Unequal income statues and social class discrimination and in-acceptance can be considered as a core reason behind the willingly committed financial frauds. As per Gottschalk (2020), the improper and gaps in the business inspections and scrutinising process prompts more engagement of people in feeling convenience in conducting financial crimes. So this research is proving that whatever the reason could be behind white collar crimes being more convenient and fascinating, no reason could support or approve these misconducts & they will always remain disapproved and illegal. Take a deeper dive into Risk Society or Governmentality with our additional resources.

References

Clarke, A.E., 2020. Is there a commendable regime for combatting money laundering in international business transactions. Journal of Money Laundering Control.

Gottschalk, P. and Gunnesdal, L., 2018. White-collar crime in the shadow economy: Lack of detection, investigation and conviction compared to social security fraud. Springer Nature.

Gottschalk, P., 2020. The convenience of white-collar crime in business. Cham: Springer.