You should read
https://www.huffpost.com/highline/article/white-collar-crime...Some excerpts (it's a great, long piece. Read it all):
"In 2017, researchers estimated that fraud by America’s largest corporations cost Americans up to $360 billion annually between 1996 and 2004. That’s roughly two decades’ worth of street crime every single year."
"Even though auditing millionaires and billionaires is one of the most cost-effective government activities imaginable—an independent report estimated in 2014 that it yielded up to $4,545 in recovered revenue per hour of staff time—the IRS investigated the returns of just 3 percent of American millionaires in 2017."
"It is, as one of those high-priced lawyers might say, improbable that these demographic and economic facts exert no influence whatsoever on judges' rulings. In a 2012 review of sentencing data in Florida, researchers found that “high-status” white collar criminals, such as doctors scamming Medicaid, were 98.7 percent less likely to receive prison terms than welfare fraudsters. A 2015 study found that judges showed increasing mercy as fraud offenders moved up the income scale: Criminals who stole more than $400 million got sentences that were less than half of the minimum recommended by federal guidelines. Criminals who stole $5,000 or less served sentences well over the minimum."
"The only thing that consistently worked was to combine them— warnings from government agencies, surveillance of the worst actors, harsher punishments for repeat offenders and, yes, at the top of the ladder, criminal prosecutions for corporations that refused to shape up.
This is hardly some exotic, untested concept. When it comes to every other form of crime, law enforcement agencies are perfectly comfortable cracking down on offenses at every level. This is the country that invented three-strikes laws and “broken windows” policing. When it comes to street gangs and drug distribution networks, the criminal justice system has no problem simplifying complex criminal liability questions into four simple words: You should have known. "