Newspaper Article

Counting Corporate Crooks

Horn, Stacy

2005

Overview

We don't know how many white collar crimes have been committed or how many arrests have been made in connection with those crimes. If you call the state attorney general's office, the F.B.I. or the Securities and Exchange Commission, no one will be able to tell you how many white collar crimes were committed in any year, or provide any arrest statistics. The investigators there could be doing a great job, but they might also be concentrating on a few, select cases for years, letting countless others go by. In order for such a reporting system to work, however, every state and federal agency investigating white collar crime needs to submit information about these crimes. And of course, we would need to establish what exactly constitutes a white collar crime. Congress enacted the National Hate Crimes Statistics Act in 1990 requiring the Justice Department to gather information on crimes based on race, religion, sexual orientation or ethnicity; perhaps a similar mandate could be passed for white collar crime. Don't get me wrong, murder is horrifying, and it's right to hold murderers and the police departments investigating them accountable. But unlike many murderers sitting in prison for life, these gentleman bandits, these intelligent, educated men and women who slowly and methodically plan the crimes that wreck the future of untold numbers of people, know exactly what they are doing and who will be hurt. Their crimes of cold, selfish greed reflect, in their own way, even more indifference to life than murder.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Business ethics / Criminal statistics / Fraud / White collar crime