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The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime

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Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime

#31

Post by csdreamer7 »

harryh wrote: post #15
themagician wrote: post #10

You'd have to completely reframe the penalty for crimes to be percentage based instead of fixed amounts. Even when caught the penalties are often so low that they don't matter, so white collar criminals go right back to it. When you can routinely make $10 million doing something a $1 million fine the one time you get caught just isn't a big deal. The cost-benefit analysis almost always favors the criminal for white c…

What is an actual example where you can make more money committing a crime than you would be forced to pay back if you are caught and convicted? I don't think your assertion is true.

> What is an actual example where you can make more money committing a crime than you would be forced to pay back if you are caught and convicted?

> I don't think your assertion is true.

I think you just haven't bothered to look.

First, our prosecutors arn't convicting, they are settling. HSBC paid 5 weeks of yearly profit for cartel money laundering.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-exa...

The justice department also called this a fair punishment for an unrelated money laundering crime for Saudi nationals funding of terrorism. They didn't even bother to bring charges. (Which is a perfect answer to your question.)

Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime

#32

Post by harryh »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #31
harryh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an actual example where you can make more money committing a crime than you would be forced to pay back if you are caught and convicted? I don't think your assertion is true.

> What is an actual example where you can make more money committing a crime than you would be forced to pay back if you are caught and convicted? > I don't think your assertion is true. I think you just haven't bothered to look. First, our prosecutors arn't convicting, they are settling. HSBC paid 5 weeks of yearly profit for cartel money laundering. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-exa... Th…

"of yearly profit" is not the relevant comparison. What is relevant is the amount of money they made from the cartel money laundering. I am preeeeety confident that HSBC didn't make ~10% of it's profits from these transactions.

Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime

#34

Post by Kaveren »

cronix wrote: post #17
cozzyd wrote: post #13

Monetary fines are not enough deterrent in many cases. Even short stints in prison might be better.

I totally agree with this. Take the recent Tesla fiasco. Do you think a $20M fine means a damn thing to Musk? That's like $0.01 for most people. Now a $20M fine and a year in prison would make them think twice. More often than not, they make more in the commission of their crimes than they are fined, so they still come out in the black. In other words, they aren't truly punished.

I don't think Elon Musk deserves to go to prison for any length of time for that. I understand that he may have been very hasty and made fraudulent claims to investors (arguable considering you can't tell his state of mind).

The United States needs to reduce its prison population, not increase it.

Suggesting he be banned from serving as CEO would be much more reasonable, though I think the fine was more than enough.

Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime

#35

Post by Eridrus »

zekevermillion wrote: post #12

We don't need a "crackdown". The problem with our approach to financial crimes is that it is based almost entirely on crackdowns -- splashy press releases that are supposed to deter all the thousands of other financial crimes that we lack resources to prosecute. Sometimes this leads to injustice, e.g., see the documentary film Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. The only bank to be prosecuted criminally for shenanigans in…

This is probably true for the IRS. I'm less sure this is true for th SEC. From the admittedly limited amount I have read about insider trading cases, it seems like the courts have interpreted the law extremely narrowly, and this has basically legalised many common forms of insider trading where there is no explicit quid pro quo. Similarly to how we have interpreted corruption.

Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime

#37

Post by mattnewton »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #29
mattnewton wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could easily solve the small buisiness problem by making the audit process happen at the government’s expense and probably still make money. We don’t have the government just tell you what you owe (like many other nations) because of the tax prep industry lobbyist and people vested on existing loopholes. I don’t believe the driving force is protecting small buisinesses from Audits- anecdotal, but small businesses…

I completely support the idea of the IRS sending individuals a default tax return which you can just use as-is if you don't have anything to dispute or amend and be done. But that doesn't work for small businesses. If you sell hamburgers, the majority of your customers won't have informed the IRS of the transaction. If any part of your supply chain includes normal retail outlets, same thing. Small business tax return…

> But that doesn't work for small businesses. If you sell hamburgers, the majority of your customers won't have informed the IRS of the transaction.

Hamburger joints getting extra scrutiny at the government’s expense doesn’t seem like a problem to me, especially since they often already do. The people who aren’t getting audited often enough are not Mom&Pop hamburger joints, no one is arguing that. The premise of the parent poster is that the IRS is underfunded to deal with real large scale white collar crime, and as I understand you argue that’s not possible without splash damage to small buisinesses. But they're unrelated: you can specifically target large buisinesses, and you can make the government pay for audit services for small buisinesses.

> Some part of their constituency wants it this way -- and it's probably the small business owners who keep getting audited even though they're not evading taxes.

That’s utter nonsense. The large Republican doners not only have large tax bills at stake but believe they should not.

http://time.com/5075076/koch-brothers-tax-bill-campaign/

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article...

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/05/sheldon-adels...

Each one of these doners individually spends hundreds of times more than the national small buisiness association on lobbying https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00005433...

And it’s harder to tell the exact numbers, but probably thousands of times more more than all small buisinesses in donations.

How ideologically bankrupt democrats are is irrelevant and doesn’t change what is happening here.

> The idea that we should be outraged at companies for not paying what the law we passed says they don't owe instead of replacing the tax laws with ones that cause them to actually owe taxes is some kind of nonsense populist rhetoric.

The idea is we should be outraged at the tax law and fix it, instead of celebrating the loopholes for billionaires.

Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime

#38

Post by nrb »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #11
saalweachter wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At ~current funding levels, the IRS brings in ~$3 for every $1 spent on it. The federal government could bring in more tax dollars just by funding the IRS at a higher level; it doesn't, for reasons.

> At ~current funding levels, the IRS brings in ~$3 for every $1 spent on it. The federal government could bring in more tax dollars just by funding the IRS at a higher level; it doesn't, for reasons. Here are some of those reasons. $3 for every $1 is an extremely misleading way of putting it, as though the IRS is a business and everything is good as long as it's turning a profit. A better way of putting it is that c…

> It's possible that we could actually raise government income by doing less enforcement, because $3 is the average. It would be a net gain to eliminate the ones where we're spending $1 to raise $.50 (or $0) as long as we keep the ones where we spend $1 to raise $20.

Keep in mind the likelihood that the enforcement actions we spend $1 to raise $0.50 are there to deter tens or hundreds of billions in related avoidance or fraud schemes. That's more important than the actual revenue recovered.

Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime

#39

Post by csdreamer7 »

harryh wrote: post #32
csdreamer7 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is an actual example where you can make more money committing a crime than you would be forced to pay back if you are caught and convicted? > I don't think your assertion is true. I think you just haven't bothered to look. First, our prosecutors arn't convicting, they are settling. HSBC paid 5 weeks of yearly profit for cartel money laundering. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-exa... Th…

"of yearly profit" is not the relevant comparison. What is relevant is the amount of money they made from the cartel money laundering. I am preeeeety confident that HSBC didn't make ~10% of it's profits from these transactions.

Please read the second paragraph again. Where they didn't even bring charges for an unrelated crime of financing terrorism that they found out later. That was my answer to your question.

Re: The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime

#40

Post by buzer »

jstanley wrote: post #16
Waterluvian wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit surprised to find someone suggesting that selling prescription pills under the counter shouldn't be illegal. Do you mind elaborating on your perspective?

If there's a willing buyer, and a willing seller, and the goods aren't stolen, and the seller isn't lying about what the goods are, then who is the victim? If there's no victim, there's no crime. (And, yes, identical logic does apply equally to illegal drugs).

It depends. Most (all?) antibiotics aren't sold without recipe. If they were and people started using them without good reason, we could end up in situation where there are no longer any effective antibiotics for the species (this is already the case to some degree, but accelerating it certainly isn't ideal).
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