This type of analysis has some obvious limitations:
- Fraud is more likely to be recorded in public record when committed at big corporations. Many small companies also commit fraud, but it goes unnoticed, unpunished, or otherwise not recorded in ways accessible to researchers because they're too small to make waves. Maybe too small to bother prosecuting.
- Big companies have, by definition, more people, more activity, more transactions, and more opportunities for fraud. It's a mistake to assume that all fraud is orchestrated from the top of these companies. Often, it's mid-level managers looking to get a bonus, raise, or promotion who think they can get away with fraud in their little department.
In my anecdotal experience, big companies are far less likely to behave fraudulently than small, local companies. A big company knows that endemic fraud is a death sentence for their reputation and can bring intense regulatory scrutiny. A small company knows that they can defraud you out of a couple thousand dollars one time and it's not worth your time to pursue legal action.
Of course, most small companies I've worked with are not out to defraud your customers. Building a long-term relationship with a small company can be much more fruitful than being customer number 10,001 for a big company.
Always be careful, regardless of who you're dealing with.
In my anecdotal experience, big companies are far less likely to behave fraudulently than small, local companies.
In my anecdotal experience, big companies are far more likely to have figured out how to walk barely on the legal side of the line. It may not be fraud per se, but it doesn't feel different on the receiving end.
Here is an example that I saw while working as a consultant at Bristol Myers Squibb. They had perfected the art of paying a lot of their bills at the last possible moment. And were happy to accept penalties to delay it more. With the explicit hope that suppliers would go broke and out of business before successfully collecting, and then they wouldn't have to pay at all.
I was horrified, and the accountant who told me about it was describing how terrible it was to be taking calls from people whose life's work was going under, and be unable to pay them what they were owed because corporate policy was clear.
And none of it was actually fraud. They were very careful to stay just within what the contract allowed.
"but it goes unnoticed, unpunished, or otherwise not recorded in ways accessible to researchers because they're too small to make waves. Maybe too small to bother prosecuting."
Hm, but small crime under the radar just as well apply to big corporations, meaning just as probably small company fraud might have been overlooked or ignored, so was probably lots of small crime on the big corporations.
So the bigger point still stands.
And what does it have to do with media coverage?
"We compiled data on 250+ US public companies involved in corporate securities frauds identified in 1,000+ Securities and Exchange Commission filings over 2005–2013"
I would assume their data is from the state from actual judgments and not that they dig in newspapers archives.
> Findings were robust to various empirical measures and additional controls for undetected fraud.
Otherwise, I think logic would dictate that greedy people try to get into bigger companies where decent amount of money is moving.
Same for fudging the books, it starts to make sense from a risk perspective if there is a decent amount of transaction to hide fraud in. For too small businesses, fraud will be more limited to not recording events (gifts etc.), and those arguably occur whatever the size of the company.
To put it differently, I think big companies will be more of a fraud magnet, and they’ll need super serious effort to guard against it. Those efforts are often not good enough/not incentivized so it’s bound to happen more often.
Neither "limitation" is inconsistent with the slightly different, but discursively relevant idea that the higher EV for fraud will skew towards bigger corporations versus smaller ones. In particular, the second limitation is not a limitation at all, but can serve as a prior explanation for why fraud is more likely in large corporations.
If you were to measure the amount of fraud per capita, small corporations might dominate; but it's the impact or scope of fraud that makes one fraud more important than another. And even if fraud within an organization is not coordinated from the CEO down, it's still the organization as a singular entity that's held accountable for the behavior of its parts.
> In my anecdotal experience, big companies are far less likely to behave fraudulently than small, local companies.
I'd imagine it's kind of a bell curve, with very small companies more likely (since some of those are 'fly by night'), increasing to some point due to more oversight / legitimacy needed to run a bigger organization, until they start to become powerful enough that corrupt people can hide things or accept fraudulent actions as a 'cost of business'.
Didn't investigate methods (and wouldn't be very qualified to judge anyway), but this study might not catch the smaller fish, so it would skew towards only catching the bigger ones, leading to the conclusion
I've noticed fraud (as a customer, and in one case as an insider) at big "growth & engagement"-funded startups most of us have heard of.
It's rarely fraud in the legal sense of the term, but it's definitely fraud in the moral sense. They exploit information asymmetry (in one case, the main customer base was mostly teenagers unaware of their options such as card disputes or small claims court) or make it hard for people to claim compensation in case things go wrong, relying on the fact that most people won't bother for the relatively small sums (though at scale that adds up to quite a bit of money).
> This type of analysis has some obvious limitations:
> - Fraud is more likely to be recorded in public record when committed at big corporations. Many small companies also commit fraud, but it goes unnoticed, unpunished, or otherwise not recorded in ways accessible to researchers because they're too small to make waves. Maybe too small to bother prosecuting.
From the article
>We compiled data on 250+ US public companies involved in corporate securities frauds identified in 1,000+ Securities and Exchange Commission filings over 2005–2013; we randomly selected a comparable control group of 500+ US public companies from Compustat. Based on logistic multivariate regression analyses, marginal profitability, a strong growth imperative, and firm prominence were significant fraud risk factors. Prominent Fortune 500 firms were more susceptible to marginal profitability and/or strong growth-opportunities as risk factors.
So it seems they only compared public companies and used SEC filings for identifying fraud, are you saying fraud for small public companies is less likely to be reported to the SEC than for large companies? Otherwise your argument does not apply.
> - Big companies have, by definition, more people, more activity, more transactions, and more opportunities for fraud. It's a mistake to assume that all fraud is orchestrated from the top of these companies. Often, it's mid-level managers looking to get a bonus, raise, or promotion who think they can get away with fraud in their little department.
That does support the thesis that large companies would commit more fraud. I didn't see a claim that fraud is orchestrated from the top.
> In my anecdotal experience, big companies are far less likely to behave fraudulently than small, local companies. A big company knows that endemic fraud is a death sentence for their reputation and can bring intense regulatory scrutiny. A small company knows that they can defraud you out of a couple thousand dollars one time and it's not worth your time to pursue legal action.
So after dismissing the representative research you bring up your anecdotal evidence. Was the motivation behind dismissing the presented research maybe that it doesn't match your own experience? This is a common psychological trap to fall into, but just because something does not match our own experience does not make it necessarily less true.
> Of course, most small companies I've worked with are not out to defraud your customers. Building a long-term relationship with a small company can be much more fruitful than being customer number 10,001 for a big company.
> Always be careful, regardless of who you're dealing with.
> examined the characteristics of more than 250 U.S. public corporations that were involved in financial securities fraud identified in Securities and Exchange Commission filings from 2005-2013. They were then compared to a control sample of firms that were not named in SEC fraud filings.
Alternatively, the SEC might be more interested in looking into larger companies.
Possibly true. However, while the IRS is not really analogous to the SEC, they do appear to audit EITC claimants (low income) at a very high rate relative to high income individuals. I have no evidence either way, but I wouldn't be surprised if the dollar value of tax fraud is skewed to higher incomes. https://www.propublica.org/article/earned-income-tax-credit-...
This seems very likely to be the case. It also ignores that big companies have more employees who can both commit crimes or act as whistleblowers. Small scale corporate crime is likely easier to keep secret.
Also, there is a lot of detection lag. Enron committed crimes for quite a while before they got caught. So did MCI.
"We compiled data on 250+ US public companies involved in corporate securities frauds identified in 1,000+ Securities and Exchange Commission filings over 2005–2013; we randomly selected a comparable control group of 500+ US public companies from Compustat."
Yeah their entire study is "we looked at a list of companies who comitted fraud, and can see that the percentage of companies in that list that committed fraud is higher than that of the average company"
Nothing was discovered here, and the title is not supported by their methodology
Just posting to lament the fact that there are two blatantly garbage-tier research articles on the front page at the moment (this and the Ramanujan machine).
As soon as I read "financial securities fraud identified in SEC filings…" immediately brought to mind an article in Bloomberg [1]:
"Securities fraud is a universal regulatory regime; anything bad that is done by or happens to a public company is also securities fraud, and it is often easier to punish the bad thing as securities fraud than it is to regulate it directly."
this right after:
"And so contributing to global warming is securities fraud, and sexual harassment by executives is securities fraud, and customer data breaches are securities fraud, and mistreating killer whales is securities fraud, and whatever else…"
Is this just a heat-map? Is the probability calculated per-dollar, or per-employee, or what? If its just per-company, then this is the expected result (a bigger pond has more fish).
I get a little upset when people want a crackdown on street crime but seem to forgive white-collar crime because "you won't get them anyway", while you easily could say that about street crime too. Arguably the US has one of the harshest policies regarding small time criminals with the highest incarceration rates of any developed country, but can't seem to actually get it under control.
What people fail to see that these small crimes like theft, drug dealing, assassinations are done because white-collar criminals can launder money. If the money can't be laundered, drug money loses much of its worth.
It is understandable that seeing young men lying dead in the street is more tangible than a bank looking away or cooperating when they come across suspicious transactions. Yet if we want to really have an impact we'll have to do something else than (just) busting small time criminals for their crimes. The big guys make the small guys do the dirty stuff.
Fraud is actually committed by individuals working for an organization. Suppose that every individual i has a certain probability P_i of committing fraud, or, equivalently, (1 - P_i) of not committing fraud.
The probability that two individuals j, k will not commit fraud is (1 - P_j) (1 - P_k), which is smaller than either probability.
Therefore, the probability that fraud is taking place in an organization increases with the number of employees:
1 - (1 - P_1) (1 - P_2) ... (1 - P_n)
Sheer organization size is a predictor for occurrence of fraud; with increasing size, the probability tends toward 1.
We can know this without gathering any data at all, just by remembering high school probability and stats.
"Big name" is not the same thing as "big", but organization size correlates with fame. "Big name" is a facsimile for "big".
This might be the case when it comes to the accounting practices but my experience has been that the smaller companies are more likely to pull a fast one on me.
I've had "small businesses" be more than happy to do work that I don't need under the excuse that something is failing. Or run the charges because my insurance will pay. I had one or 2 electronic stores try to do a bait and switch. I've found that small businesses are more hungry to make a sale and are therefore more likely to be a bit more shady than the bigger companies.
If I have a choice I always pick the bigger company that has a reputation to protect over a small business that I don't really know.
> The researchers noted that this type of elite, white-collar crime is understudied especially when compared with street crime even though it has more wide-reaching consequences.
Isn't that something. We spend most of our effort chasing the crime of least consequence? Now why would that be?
It may not have direct monetary impacts as large but I would argue the effects of high street crime are much higher and harder to account for. People know that backroom deals by fat cats negatively affect their lives, but they don’t feel physically unsafe because of them. Conversely if street crime is prevalent the people are fearful and feel unsafe in their homes. It only takes one break-in in a neighborhood to put everyone on their toes.
It's harder to mentally connect white collar crime with real harm because there are so many abstraction levels between the crime and the victims. Whereas with pretty crime it's easy to see who the victims are.
It's not a conspiracy. Street crime is much easier to prosecute and has far fewer eyes looking onwards. Much easier to abuse the metrics in that area to look good at your job, whereas tackling corporate fraud is expensive, time consuming and likely to attract all manners of unwanted attention, even physical violence and intimidation -- thus making people look worse on paper.
The pretty awesome "Philosophize This" podcast* episode on Foucault, where he discusses crime and punishment over the years, makes an interesting point that always stuck with me regarding punishment of white collar crime:
"9 times out of 10 they are not going to see the inside of a prison cell because their behavior...doesn't really need much reformation in the eyes of the people in power. Keep doing almost everything you're doing...keep working, keep creating jobs, keep starting new companies and going to badminton on Sundays...just pay your taxes. Whereas the guy that robbed the Taco Bell...it doesn't matter if he marches back into the store...hands over the 85 bucks directly to the manager...baby birds the burrito supreme back into his mouth...9 times out of 10 that guy is going to jail because the goal of the penal system is reforming criminals to fit a pre-existing mold of what a normal person is."
Of course this doesn't get into the very real issues of how modern US police departments work, systematic racism and other factors, but it's still an interesting perspective IMO.
Well, somebody claiming it has more wide reaching consequences doesn't make it true. I mean why is white collar crime worse than getting knifed in a backallay?
Because you (the people) don't vote for people who actually want to prosecute white-collar criminals. That probably comes from it not being so relatable. Most people understand physical theft and probably think it's easier to catch those thieves.
Sure, a big part of the problem is white-collar crooks working in industries that possess a lot of power to manipulate the world we live in, but we can't just absolve ourselves of responsibility. If you think it's a problem, find the most impactful ways you can help resolve it. Simply talking about it and convincing yourself that "you made more people aware of it" is not very impactful if that's all you're doing.
Some of the other replies are missing the fact that we can look at the history of why police departments were created: to break strikes and chase slaves. The historic record is clear that police were generally created to protect capital.
Theranos.
When the benefits of fraud greatly outweighs cost of fraud, companies and people will commit fraud.
HSBC money laundering for criminal cartels.
Big companies will commit outright crimes and when caught, simply pay some fines that is much less than the profit.
How does the market differentiate between money losing startup, like Amazon of past, and some money losing penny stock pitching free energy electric car engine, aka perpetual engine ? Lots of muddy waters and shady regulations that hide many fraudulent companies preying on people.
> Fortune 500 firms with strong growth profiles are more susceptible to “cooking the books” than smaller, struggling companies
Curious if this has something to do with the type of law firms/accounting firms these big companies hire -- as opposed to smaller firms hired by struggling companies, that have more to worry about when it comes to reputation (aka the companies aren't forced to use them every few years, as with big acct firms)
Fallacy study, from the start. This study need big data analysis to make an unbiased conclusion. Collect all companies data on earth (law cases, locality, races/ethnics, etc). Big or small (company's size) is nothing to do with fraudulent.
This is why monetary fines are a fundamentally wrong method of punishment. When breaking the law becomes a line item on a budget a company will do anything as long as it's profitable. Breaking the law always comes down to the personal choice of an individual or individuals and therefore the consequences should fall on those individuals. When Verizon chooses not to meet its legal obligations to build out fiber and maintain copper infrastructure, they shouldn't be scared of the FCC fining them. They should be scared of their board members being hauled into prison in orange jumpsuits.
This is a bit like the difference between old wars, where people faced their foes, and modern war where you guide some weapons on a screen. You care less.
Big corporations are simply more likely to be able to defend themselves, so maybe it's just natural selection. Those who tried to investigate and prosecute them, are no longer on the jobs...
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|5 years ago|reply
This type of analysis has some obvious limitations:
- Fraud is more likely to be recorded in public record when committed at big corporations. Many small companies also commit fraud, but it goes unnoticed, unpunished, or otherwise not recorded in ways accessible to researchers because they're too small to make waves. Maybe too small to bother prosecuting.
- Big companies have, by definition, more people, more activity, more transactions, and more opportunities for fraud. It's a mistake to assume that all fraud is orchestrated from the top of these companies. Often, it's mid-level managers looking to get a bonus, raise, or promotion who think they can get away with fraud in their little department.
In my anecdotal experience, big companies are far less likely to behave fraudulently than small, local companies. A big company knows that endemic fraud is a death sentence for their reputation and can bring intense regulatory scrutiny. A small company knows that they can defraud you out of a couple thousand dollars one time and it's not worth your time to pursue legal action.
Of course, most small companies I've worked with are not out to defraud your customers. Building a long-term relationship with a small company can be much more fruitful than being customer number 10,001 for a big company.
Always be careful, regardless of who you're dealing with.
[+] [-] btilly|5 years ago|reply
In my anecdotal experience, big companies are far more likely to have figured out how to walk barely on the legal side of the line. It may not be fraud per se, but it doesn't feel different on the receiving end.
Here is an example that I saw while working as a consultant at Bristol Myers Squibb. They had perfected the art of paying a lot of their bills at the last possible moment. And were happy to accept penalties to delay it more. With the explicit hope that suppliers would go broke and out of business before successfully collecting, and then they wouldn't have to pay at all.
I was horrified, and the accountant who told me about it was describing how terrible it was to be taking calls from people whose life's work was going under, and be unable to pay them what they were owed because corporate policy was clear.
And none of it was actually fraud. They were very careful to stay just within what the contract allowed.
[+] [-] hutzlibu|5 years ago|reply
Hm, but small crime under the radar just as well apply to big corporations, meaning just as probably small company fraud might have been overlooked or ignored, so was probably lots of small crime on the big corporations.
So the bigger point still stands.
And what does it have to do with media coverage?
"We compiled data on 250+ US public companies involved in corporate securities frauds identified in 1,000+ Securities and Exchange Commission filings over 2005–2013"
I would assume their data is from the state from actual judgments and not that they dig in newspapers archives.
[+] [-] hrktb|5 years ago|reply
> Findings were robust to various empirical measures and additional controls for undetected fraud.
Otherwise, I think logic would dictate that greedy people try to get into bigger companies where decent amount of money is moving.
Same for fudging the books, it starts to make sense from a risk perspective if there is a decent amount of transaction to hide fraud in. For too small businesses, fraud will be more limited to not recording events (gifts etc.), and those arguably occur whatever the size of the company.
To put it differently, I think big companies will be more of a fraud magnet, and they’ll need super serious effort to guard against it. Those efforts are often not good enough/not incentivized so it’s bound to happen more often.
[+] [-] bordercases|5 years ago|reply
If you were to measure the amount of fraud per capita, small corporations might dominate; but it's the impact or scope of fraud that makes one fraud more important than another. And even if fraud within an organization is not coordinated from the CEO down, it's still the organization as a singular entity that's held accountable for the behavior of its parts.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cat199|5 years ago|reply
I'd imagine it's kind of a bell curve, with very small companies more likely (since some of those are 'fly by night'), increasing to some point due to more oversight / legitimacy needed to run a bigger organization, until they start to become powerful enough that corrupt people can hide things or accept fraudulent actions as a 'cost of business'.
Didn't investigate methods (and wouldn't be very qualified to judge anyway), but this study might not catch the smaller fish, so it would skew towards only catching the bigger ones, leading to the conclusion
[+] [-] Nextgrid|5 years ago|reply
It's rarely fraud in the legal sense of the term, but it's definitely fraud in the moral sense. They exploit information asymmetry (in one case, the main customer base was mostly teenagers unaware of their options such as card disputes or small claims court) or make it hard for people to claim compensation in case things go wrong, relying on the fact that most people won't bother for the relatively small sums (though at scale that adds up to quite a bit of money).
[+] [-] tobylane|5 years ago|reply
Maybe someone with access (OpenAthena, Shibboleth) could post the stats and methodology.
[+] [-] cycomanic|5 years ago|reply
> This type of analysis has some obvious limitations:
> - Fraud is more likely to be recorded in public record when committed at big corporations. Many small companies also commit fraud, but it goes unnoticed, unpunished, or otherwise not recorded in ways accessible to researchers because they're too small to make waves. Maybe too small to bother prosecuting.
From the article >We compiled data on 250+ US public companies involved in corporate securities frauds identified in 1,000+ Securities and Exchange Commission filings over 2005–2013; we randomly selected a comparable control group of 500+ US public companies from Compustat. Based on logistic multivariate regression analyses, marginal profitability, a strong growth imperative, and firm prominence were significant fraud risk factors. Prominent Fortune 500 firms were more susceptible to marginal profitability and/or strong growth-opportunities as risk factors.
So it seems they only compared public companies and used SEC filings for identifying fraud, are you saying fraud for small public companies is less likely to be reported to the SEC than for large companies? Otherwise your argument does not apply.
> - Big companies have, by definition, more people, more activity, more transactions, and more opportunities for fraud. It's a mistake to assume that all fraud is orchestrated from the top of these companies. Often, it's mid-level managers looking to get a bonus, raise, or promotion who think they can get away with fraud in their little department.
That does support the thesis that large companies would commit more fraud. I didn't see a claim that fraud is orchestrated from the top.
> In my anecdotal experience, big companies are far less likely to behave fraudulently than small, local companies. A big company knows that endemic fraud is a death sentence for their reputation and can bring intense regulatory scrutiny. A small company knows that they can defraud you out of a couple thousand dollars one time and it's not worth your time to pursue legal action.
So after dismissing the representative research you bring up your anecdotal evidence. Was the motivation behind dismissing the presented research maybe that it doesn't match your own experience? This is a common psychological trap to fall into, but just because something does not match our own experience does not make it necessarily less true.
> Of course, most small companies I've worked with are not out to defraud your customers. Building a long-term relationship with a small company can be much more fruitful than being customer number 10,001 for a big company.
> Always be careful, regardless of who you're dealing with.
[+] [-] nullserver|5 years ago|reply
Rented a house from Invitation Homes. Show up. All windows open. House looks great, sign paperwork. Agent leaves.
Closed up windows, notice a chemical smell. Call, and told it’s just new carpeting, will be gone soon.
Me and family proceed to get extremely sick over the next months. Like people can’t wake up, forgetting names, stroke symptoms, etc.
Many calls got nothing but run around. Our mental capacities are greatly diminished.
Turns out there was a massive natural gas leak. Plus multiple appliances emitting Carbon monoxide.
Gas company stated it was a race to dying in sleep or house exploding.
So they knew house had weird smells and fed us endless lies about carpets, flooring, paint etc.
Carbon monoxide detector that came with the house was defective.
Destroyed health and career. One kid went from advanced placement to special needs. Dog went insane.
We also had a wall catch on fire, ac drop through a ceiling into kids room.
We left moment we could, and have a nice big bill from them for breaking lease.
Invitation Homes is straight up evil.
[+] [-] yumraj|5 years ago|reply
Were you able to find who lived there before you and if they had the same thing happen to them, then you have a much better case.
[+] [-] neolog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tehlike|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jefftk|5 years ago|reply
Alternatively, the SEC might be more interested in looking into larger companies.
[+] [-] dundarious|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abakker|5 years ago|reply
Also, there is a lot of detection lag. Enron committed crimes for quite a while before they got caught. So did MCI.
[+] [-] gwern|5 years ago|reply
"We compiled data on 250+ US public companies involved in corporate securities frauds identified in 1,000+ Securities and Exchange Commission filings over 2005–2013; we randomly selected a comparable control group of 500+ US public companies from Compustat."
[+] [-] djbebs|5 years ago|reply
Nothing was discovered here, and the title is not supported by their methodology
[+] [-] _8091149529|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tremendo|5 years ago|reply
"Securities fraud is a universal regulatory regime; anything bad that is done by or happens to a public company is also securities fraud, and it is often easier to punish the bad thing as securities fraud than it is to regulate it directly."
this right after:
"And so contributing to global warming is securities fraud, and sexual harassment by executives is securities fraud, and customer data breaches are securities fraud, and mistreating killer whales is securities fraud, and whatever else…"
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
The point of TFA likely still stands, but I wonder to what extent the points from Levine's Bloomberg article colors, or skews the data.
Edited for formatting
[+] [-] KirillPanov|5 years ago|reply
If you do anything illegal, and there was any kind of economic transaction involved, you almost certainly committed money laundering.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FriedrichN|5 years ago|reply
What people fail to see that these small crimes like theft, drug dealing, assassinations are done because white-collar criminals can launder money. If the money can't be laundered, drug money loses much of its worth.
It is understandable that seeing young men lying dead in the street is more tangible than a bank looking away or cooperating when they come across suspicious transactions. Yet if we want to really have an impact we'll have to do something else than (just) busting small time criminals for their crimes. The big guys make the small guys do the dirty stuff.
[+] [-] kazinator|5 years ago|reply
The probability that two individuals j, k will not commit fraud is (1 - P_j) (1 - P_k), which is smaller than either probability.
Therefore, the probability that fraud is taking place in an organization increases with the number of employees:
1 - (1 - P_1) (1 - P_2) ... (1 - P_n)
Sheer organization size is a predictor for occurrence of fraud; with increasing size, the probability tends toward 1.
We can know this without gathering any data at all, just by remembering high school probability and stats.
"Big name" is not the same thing as "big", but organization size correlates with fame. "Big name" is a facsimile for "big".
[+] [-] WheelsAtLarge|5 years ago|reply
I've had "small businesses" be more than happy to do work that I don't need under the excuse that something is failing. Or run the charges because my insurance will pay. I had one or 2 electronic stores try to do a bait and switch. I've found that small businesses are more hungry to make a sale and are therefore more likely to be a bit more shady than the bigger companies.
If I have a choice I always pick the bigger company that has a reputation to protect over a small business that I don't really know.
[+] [-] DangitBobby|5 years ago|reply
Isn't that something. We spend most of our effort chasing the crime of least consequence? Now why would that be?
[+] [-] jjcon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umvi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway3699|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbattaglia|5 years ago|reply
"9 times out of 10 they are not going to see the inside of a prison cell because their behavior...doesn't really need much reformation in the eyes of the people in power. Keep doing almost everything you're doing...keep working, keep creating jobs, keep starting new companies and going to badminton on Sundays...just pay your taxes. Whereas the guy that robbed the Taco Bell...it doesn't matter if he marches back into the store...hands over the 85 bucks directly to the manager...baby birds the burrito supreme back into his mouth...9 times out of 10 that guy is going to jail because the goal of the penal system is reforming criminals to fit a pre-existing mold of what a normal person is."
Of course this doesn't get into the very real issues of how modern US police departments work, systematic racism and other factors, but it's still an interesting perspective IMO.
*transcript: https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/episode-121-transcr...
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|5 years ago|reply
I would rather lose $1000 in the stock market because a company cooked the books than $50 by mugging or home burglary.
[+] [-] andi999|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LockAndLol|5 years ago|reply
Sure, a big part of the problem is white-collar crooks working in industries that possess a lot of power to manipulate the world we live in, but we can't just absolve ourselves of responsibility. If you think it's a problem, find the most impactful ways you can help resolve it. Simply talking about it and convincing yourself that "you made more people aware of it" is not very impactful if that's all you're doing.
[+] [-] SN76477|5 years ago|reply
The policing system needs an overhaul
[+] [-] nobodyknowsyoda|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wwwwwwwww|5 years ago|reply
Who donates money to fund the studies?
[+] [-] dls2016|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cccc4all|5 years ago|reply
HSBC money laundering for criminal cartels. Big companies will commit outright crimes and when caught, simply pay some fines that is much less than the profit.
How does the market differentiate between money losing startup, like Amazon of past, and some money losing penny stock pitching free energy electric car engine, aka perpetual engine ? Lots of muddy waters and shady regulations that hide many fraudulent companies preying on people.
[+] [-] cwwc|5 years ago|reply
Curious if this has something to do with the type of law firms/accounting firms these big companies hire -- as opposed to smaller firms hired by struggling companies, that have more to worry about when it comes to reputation (aka the companies aren't forced to use them every few years, as with big acct firms)
[+] [-] microdrum|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atomicson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DodgyEggplant|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Triv888|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hikerclimber|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anovikov|5 years ago|reply