white-collar crime

—white-collar criminal.

any of various crimes, as embezzlement, fraud, or stealing office equipment, committed by business or professional people while working at their occupations.

[1945-50]

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Introduction

  crime committed by persons who, often by virtue of their occupations, exploit social, economic, or technological power for personal or corporate gain. The term, coined in 1949 by the American criminologist Edwin Sutherland (Sutherland, Edwin), drew attention to the typical attire of the perpetrators, who were generally businesspeople, high-ranking professionals, and politicians. Since Sutherland's time, however, such crimes have ceased to be the exclusive domain of these groups. Moreover, developments in commerce and technology have broadened the scope of white-collar crime to include cybercrime (computer crime), health-care fraud, and intellectual property crimes, in addition to more-traditional crimes involving embezzlement, bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, perjury, money laundering, antitrust violations, tax crimes, and regulatory violations.

      Specific examples of activities that constitute white-collar crimes include price collusion (conspiring with other corporations to fix the prices of goods or services as a means of obtaining artificially high profits or driving a competitor out of the market), falsifying reports of tests on pharmaceutical products to obtain manufacturing licenses, and substituting cheap, defective materials for costlier components specified in the construction of roads or buildings but charging the customer for the full cost of the specified materials. At times such activities can be attributed to individual employees or executives acting on their own initiative, but it is often the case that they represent a collective and organized effort by a corporation to increase its profits at any cost.

      White-collar crime that is part of a collective and organized effort to serve the economic interests of a corporation is known as corporate crime. In some cases corporate crimes are conducted by bogus entities that pose as legal corporations or partnerships. Although corporations cannot be incarcerated, they can be criminally punished with fines and other sanctions. Criminal liability in these cases is based on the acts or omissions of the company's employees and executives.

Common characteristics

      Although white-collar crimes are quite varied, most have several characteristics in common. First, they involve the use of deceit and concealment, rather than the application of force or violence, for the illegitimate gain of money, property, or services. A defendant convicted of making false statements in order to obtain a government contract, for example, is considered a white-collar criminal.

      Next, white-collar crimes typically involve abuse of positions of trust and power. Public officials who solicit and accept bribes, or corporate officers who fix prices to drive competitors out of business, are engaging in such abuse of their positions. White-collar crime is also often more difficult to detect than other types of crime, in part because losses may not be immediately apparent to victims but also because the crimes can involve sophisticated schemes and cover-ups. Many white-collar crimes require concerted criminal activity by coconspirators. For example, a case of real-estate (real and personal property) fraud may involve the knowing participation of an escrow officer, a buyer, an appraiser, and a bank officer, all of whom were willing to sign false documents to perpetrate a fraud for personal gain.

       fraud, the most common type of white-collar crime, involves obtaining money or services by making false representations or promises. The key question in these cases is ordinarily whether the defendant intended to deceive the victims or merely failed in an honest business venture. One of the most common types of fraud involves telemarketing schemes that misrepresent the value, the terms of sale, or the use of the goods or services being sold.

       perjury, obstruction of justice, false statements, and witness tampering are also considered white-collar crimes. Although the goal is not necessarily to obtain money or services, these crimes are illegal because they interfere with the proper functioning of the justice system. Bribery and extortion are more general, in that they constitute illegal means of influencing persons in power in public or private institutions. bribery involves the giving of something of value in exchange for an official's exercise of power. extortion is a threat made to obtain a benefit from either a public official or a private individual. Money laundering is a relatively new type of white-collar crime that is utilized by criminals wishing to conceal profits gained through illegal activities. Drug dealers and purveyors of counterfeit goods and currencies will create money-laundering schemes to hide the source of their earnings.

      A wide variety of regulatory offenses are also considered to be white-collar crimes. These may include violation of tax laws, avoidance of currency-reporting requirements, securities violations, and environmental crimes. In addition to criminal punishment, those convicted of regulatory violations may also be subject to civil and administrative penalties. Such violations, unlike common-law crimes, may not require any criminal intent by the defendant. Instead, they may be seen as “strict liability” crimes for which mere failure to comply with the legal standards is sufficient grounds to establish criminal liability.

      Computer crimes (cybercrime) represent one means by which white-collar criminals exploit technology. Common examples cover a wide variety of criminal activity, including using a computer as a mechanism for committing securities fraud, credit-card fraud, and identity theft. Computer crimes also may involve illegally accessing and tampering with other users' computer files.

Cost to society

      White-collar crime represents one of the fastest-growing types of crime in the world. Nearly every category of white-collar crime has increased in incidence in recent years. For example, over the course of two years in the early 21st century, annual losses from fraudulent use of identity rose by more than $300 million in the United States. (See Identity theft and invasion of privacy (cybercrime).) Likewise, while the number of almost every other type of civil lawsuit in the United States decreased around the turn of the 21st century, the number of government and private lawsuits for white-collar crimes more than doubled during the same time period.

 This represented a trend, begun in the late 20th century, of a number of highly visible white-collar prosecutions in the United States. They included the prosecution of financiers Ivan Boesky (1986) and Michael Milken (Milken, Michael R.) (1990) for billions of dollars in securities fraud, the convictions of banker Charles Keating (1992 and 1993) for having looted his own savings and loan (savings and loan association) (S&L), ultimately touching off what became known as the “S&L Crisis,” and the guilty plea entered by Enron Corp.'s chief financial officer, Andrew Fastow (2004), on charges of having manipulated off-balance-sheet transactions (in this case, of having concealed the company's debt obligations by transferring them to offshore partnerships), which led to Enron's collapse. In an associated case, Enron's accounting firm, Arthur Andersen LLP, was convicted of obstruction of justice (2002; overturned in 2005), which caused the firm to go out of business.

      Similar cases have occurred throughout the world. In February 1995, Barings Bank in London collapsed as a result of deceptions practiced over three years by one of its futures traders. In Canada, two people pleaded guilty in 2001 to having bilked financial institutions, including the Royal Bank, out of $92 million by creating 52 fake leases for nonexistent medical equipment.

      Although white-collar crime has traditionally been viewed as less serious than other types of crime (largely because it does not involve physical violence), by the late 20th century there was a growing recognition of the significant harm it causes. In a single year, for example, nearly $500 million in restitution was awarded to victims of white-collar crimes.

      The cost of corporate crime to society is many times that of organized crime or the more common street crime. Moreover, it cannot be measured in monetary damages alone, because corporate crimes can also pose health risks, compromise safety, cause injuries or fatalities, bring harm to wildlife and the environment, and lead to organizational failures and associated job losses. Owing to the concealed nature of many frauds and the fact that few are reported even when discovered, their cost is impossible to estimate precisely, but in the United States it is thought to be at least 10 times the combined cost of thefts, burglaries, and robberies. When compared with crimes committed by juveniles or the poor, corporate crimes are very rarely prosecuted in the criminal courts, and, despite many well-publicized convictions of corporate leaders found guilty of wrongdoing, executives rarely go to jail, though some companies may pay large fines.

Laurie L. Levenson

Additional Reading

The seminal work is Edwin H. Sutherland, White Collar Crime (1949, reissued 1983), with an excellent introduction and including the names of corporations not printed in the original edition. White-collar crime is examined in James Coleman, The Criminal Elite: Understanding White-Collar Crime (1998), an overview of the motivations behind and practices of white-collar criminals; and M. David Ermann and Richard J. Lundman (eds.), Corporate and Governmental Deviance, 5th ed. (1996), a review of notable and sensational cases, particularly involving American corporations.General topics in white-collar crime are treated in Joachim J. Savelsberg and Peter Brühl, Constructing White-Collar Crime: Rationalities, Communication, Power (1994), a discussion of conceptual issues; Michael Levi, Regulating Fraud: White-Collar Crime and the Criminal Process (1987), a study of the political and economic impact of fraud and how the British judicial system treats it; and M. David Ermann and Richard J. Lundman (eds.), Corporate and Governmental Deviance, 5th ed. (1996), an overview of some of the more sensational cases, particularly of malpractice, by U.S. corporations against owners, employees, customers, and the general public.

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