Criminal process and white-collar crime

THE EDITOR: White-collar crime in TT today can openly compete with street crime yet we have the tendency to persistently maintain this social perception as elitist.

White-collar crimes are economic offences committed through the use of some combination of fraud, deception, or collusion. They come in many forms:

* The setting up of businesses to obtain large quantities of goods on credit without intending to pay for them;

* The use of mail-order businesses to obtain money for goods that one does not intend to supply;

* The pocketing by brokers of funds that they have promised to invest;

* The diversion of funds to one’s own account by means of computers;

* The illegal use of private inside knowledge to make a profit on share-dealing; and

* The non-declaration of taxable commercial sales to the VAT section of the Inland Revenue Division, Ministry of Finance.

Street crimes and household crimes have dominated political debate, and arguments continue to concentrate on these types of crimes rather than on business crime, which has been disregarded as being irrelevant to the alleged drift into a law and order society.

However, business crime remains interesting not only because of its social and economic significance but also precisely because of the ambiguity in whether or not it should be part of the crime problem.

According to criminologists, white-collar crime is organised crime. The control mechanism for corporate and organised crime are different in terms of the social standing of the suspects and in terms of the comparative immunity of white-collar crimes, both from the police surveillance and from the normal stimulus response mechanism of crime prosecution which, corruption apart, can be identified in the handling of street crimes.

However, one important change in this demarcation, which has not yet been appreciated sufficiently in the society, is that the growing involvement of professional and organised criminals in sophisticated fraud and the increasing use of financial institutions to launder vast quantities of money from fraud, as well as from so-called victimless crimes such as narcotics, gambling, pornography, and prostitution, is bringing official attitudes to regulating the legal to those of regulating the illegal.

The strategic role of financial institutions in facilitating the international drugs and human trades has brought in its wake a level of law enforcement interest in commerce that is beginning to prise open banking secrecy and increasingly will bring commercial fraud under police surveillance.

This combined with other social changes means that some of the activities of commercial elites are now liable to greater official and social scrutiny.

Moreover, there are powerful counter-pressures from financial institutions and other interested parties who are concerned about the intrusions of government into private commercial transactions and about the implications of this for their profit.

But individuals’ involvement in money-laundering and in financial fraud is slowly altering the focus of policing – improving its strategies so that it can focus on the parts that are considered legal which intersect with the activities of organised crime groups.

VAL SMITH

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