White Collar Crime eJournal最新文献

{"title":"The Insurance Hypothesis: The Case of KPMG's Audit Clients","authors":"D. Brown, Susan Shu, Gregory M. Trompeter","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1339985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1339985","url":null,"abstract":"Although many have argued that independent audits implicitly provide clients with a form of insurance (the insurance hypothesis), there is limited empirical evidence to support the existence and magnitude of this function. In August of 2005, after months of intense negotiations and discussions, KPMG entered into a settlement agreement with the Department of Justice, which ended widespread speculation of an impending federal indictment against the audit firm and the notion that the firm would suffer the same fate as Arthur Andersen. We argue that the circumstances surrounding the settlement provide a natural setting to test the insurance value provided by auditors. Our results show that, while BIG 4 non-KPMG client firms earn insignificant abnormal returns, KPMG client firms earn significantly positive abnormal returns during the days surrounding news of the settlement. We show that these positive abnormal returns vary cross-sectionally, and are more pronounced for KPMG client firms in greater financial distress and for those subject to greater litigation risk.","PeriodicalId":376821,"journal":{"name":"White Collar Crime eJournal","volume":"242 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124669493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Story of Allis-Chalmers, Caremark, and Stone: Directors' Evolving Duty to Monitor","authors":"Jennifer H. Arlen","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1304272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1304272","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the evolution in Delaware's approach to director oversight of legal compliance. The transformation of Delaware's duty to monitor is, in part, a story of how the dramatic increase in the scope and magnitude of federal corporate criminal liability pushed the Delaware state courts to treat compliance with federal criminal law as an important corporate governance issue. It also is the story of the struggle between the Delaware Chancery Court and the Delaware Supreme Court over the standard of conduct and standard of review to govern directors' oversight duties. In the seminal opinion on this issue, In re Caremark International Inc. Derivative Litigation, Chancellor William T. Allen challenged two different facets of Delaware Supreme Court precedent. First, he in effect reversed Allis-Chalmers by holding that directors have a duty to ensure that the firm establishes an effective compliance program, where no duty previously existed. Second, he pushed back against Smith v. Van Gorkom by holding that (i) the proper standard of review to govern director liability for breach of this monitoring duty was good faith, not gross negligence (irrespective of 102(b)(7)), and (ii) that bad faith required a conscious neglect of duty, not merely objectively (excessively) unreasonable conduct. Chancellor Allen's approach in Caremark arises from his twin convictions that (1) directors will satisfy judicially imposed duties even without the threat of liability and (2) judges do not have the expertise to assess the objective reasonableness of directors' actions. Caremark succeeded in moving the Delaware Supreme Court to Chancellor Allen's approach, as evident from Stone v. Ritter. Yet, as became evident following WorldCom and Enron, Caremark did not induce directors to focus adequately on compliance. Caremark specifies a general oversight duty, without specific content. Directors have latitude to adopt a loose interpretation of their oversight duties, largely insulated from liability by the good faith standard of review. In response, federal authorities and the stock exchanges intervened with more precise rules relating to corporate oversight of compliance.","PeriodicalId":376821,"journal":{"name":"White Collar Crime eJournal","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127215847","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Is My Client's Conduct Dishonest or Merely Excusable Sharp Practice?","authors":"Janet Austin","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1288970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1288970","url":null,"abstract":"Dishonesty is fast becoming entrenched in commercial law in Australia as the defining characteristic distinguishing criminal conduct from conduct which only has civil or civil penalty consequences. Many of the serious offence provisions under the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) require the prosecution to prove dishonesty and dishonesty has been adopted as a key element of the new cartel offence provision which is proposed for inclusion in the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth). Whilst deciding whether conduct is dishonest may be straightforward in most cases, situations can arise where a lawyer may be asked to advise a client as to whether a proposed course of conduct is dishonest and the answer may not be clear cut. Advising a client in such a situation may be difficult because current tests of dishonesty tend to reflect standards of ethics and morality generally accepted by the community which may not accord with the client's and/or the lawyer's personal standards. This article will examine the concept of dishonesty in the context of commercial crime, attempt to add some clarity to this particularly fluid concept and scrutinize the lawyers' role in ensuring clients' actions accord with community values.","PeriodicalId":376821,"journal":{"name":"White Collar Crime eJournal","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121427702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"No Cop on the Beat: Underenforcement in E-Commerce and Cybercrime","authors":"Peter P. Swire","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1135704","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1135704","url":null,"abstract":"This essay gives new reasons why we should expect underenforcement for E-commerce, cybercrime, and Internet harms more broadly. It also recommends a strategy for addressing that underenforcement, focusing on more federal or federated enforcement. The essay stresses an information problem and a commons problem that have largely been overlooked to date. In brief, the information problem arises because only a tiny fraction of complaints and knowledge about an online fraudster or criminal comes from each jurisdiction. Enforcers thus lack the informational basis for telling good guys from bad guys. Priority bad guys are thus less likely to become the targets for enforcement. This information problem is compounded by a commons problem. In light of the incentives facing enforcement agencies, priority will typically go to cases where many or all of the victims are local. No one will have the incentive to give priority to harms that occur across borders. This is a classic commons problem, because cross-border harms will be left to someone else. In short, no one will own these problems, and there will be underenforcement. These information and commons problems exacerbate the forensic problem that has been the focus of the greatest legal attention to date, the problem that it is often technically and legally difficult to gather evidence where the perpetrator is physically distant from the victim. The basic response should be to shift toward more federal and federated enforcement. Federal enforcement means a greater role, compared to offline activity, for the Federal Trade Commission in consumer protection and the Department of Justice for cybercrime. Federated enforcement means building new structures, compared to offline activity, to share information among local enforcers and to encourage local enforcers to bring more enforcement actions even when the perpetrator and many of the victims are outside of their jurisdiction. Part I of the essay explains the information, commons, and forensic problems in greater depth, and explores policy and legal responses to those problems. Part II responds to five possible critiques, which I call: (1) The Internet hasn't really changed anything; (2) Enforcement works better on the Internet; (3) We actually don't want enforcement for what's done on the Internet; (4) States need to be the laboratories of experimentation; and (5) The Feds don't do small potatoes.","PeriodicalId":376821,"journal":{"name":"White Collar Crime eJournal","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129788899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"More Narrative, Less Arithmetic: Appropriately Assessing the Harm of White-Collar Financial Losses","authors":"Damon Brinson","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1393794","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1393794","url":null,"abstract":"The Federal Sentencing Guidelines are advisory but highly influential. The advice they give today is followed in a substantial majority of cases, and, in white collar criminal cases where the sentence is determined largely by number of victims or amount of financial losses, the Guidelines risk over- and under-punishing due to poorly-engineered mechanisms for quantifying harm. This Paper proposes Guideline amendments to focus the harm calculation less on the abstract mathematics of financial losses or large, distributed classes of victims and more on the nature and extent of the harms of financial losses to individuals and organizations. These amendments will result in more punishment for higher-impact harms and less punishment for lower-impact harms. As well, they will produce more punishment for substantial harms inflicted on large numbers of victims, even when the victims are not individually identifiable, and less punishment for inconsequential harms shared among broadly distributed groups of victims. The end result is an application of retributive punishment more proportionately linked to the objectively measurable impact of the harm, whether intensely concentrated or highly dispersed, to provide increased retribution and deterrence for offenses causing more human suffering.","PeriodicalId":376821,"journal":{"name":"White Collar Crime eJournal","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126849800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Public Spending and Organised Crime in Italy - A Panel-Data Analysis Over the Period 1997-2003 (Spesa Pubblica E Criminalità Organizzata in Italia Evidenza Empirica Su Dati Panel Nel Periodo 1997-2003)","authors":"Raul Caruso","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1086628","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1086628","url":null,"abstract":"This work presents original results regarding the relationship between economic life and organised crime in Italy. This empirical study is underpinned by some theoretical insights drawn from conflict and rent-seeking theories. Then the paper presents a panel analysis including the twenty Italian regions over the period 1997-2003. The results show that: (a) a significant positive association does exist between investments in real estate sector and the index of organised crime; (b) a significant positive association does exist between public investments and the index of organised crime index; (c) a significant negative association does exist between social protection expenditures and the index of organised crime; (d) a significant negative association does exist between investments in private investments and the index of organised crime.","PeriodicalId":376821,"journal":{"name":"White Collar Crime eJournal","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129685545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Criminalising the Market in Illicit Antiquities: An Evaluation of the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act 2003","authors":"Simon Mackenzie, P. Green","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1004267","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1004267","url":null,"abstract":"This is a 2007 research report containing data and analysis in relation to an ESRC-funded study of the reception of the 2003 Act by the antiquities market in London.","PeriodicalId":376821,"journal":{"name":"White Collar Crime eJournal","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123264942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prepaid Cards: Vulnerable to Money Laundering?","authors":"Stanley J. Sienkiewicz","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.969042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.969042","url":null,"abstract":"This paper discusses the potential money laundering threat that prepaid cards face as they enter the mainstream of consumer payments. Over the past year, several government agencies have issued reports describing the threat to the U.S. financial system, including the use of prepaid cards by money launderers. Also, this paper incorporates the presentations made at a workshop hosted by the Payment Cards Center at which Patrice Motz, executive vice president, Premier Compliance Solutions, and Paul Silverstein, executive vice president, Epoch Data Inc., led discussions. These two leading anti-money laundering strategists explained how money laundering occurs in financial payments and how firms can mitigate and detect money laundering activities. This paper provides an overview of money laundering, describes how prepaid cards could be abused, and outlines how both the government and the payment sectors have responded to mitigate risks.","PeriodicalId":376821,"journal":{"name":"White Collar Crime eJournal","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122995464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Because That's Where the Money Is: Toward a Theory and Strategy of Corporate Legal Compliance","authors":"W. Bradford","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.955428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.955428","url":null,"abstract":"Upon his capture in 1934, the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton was asked by FBI agents, Why do you rob banks, Willie? Sutton, who believed the question to be rhetorical, replied, dryly, Because that's where the money is. In other words, Sutton understood his interrogator to be inquiring as to why he robbed banks rather than, say, homes, or gas stations, or church offering plates. Had he understood the query as intended - i.e., what was it about Willie Sutton the impelled Willie Sutton to crime when many others, struggling to survive the Great Depression, were not? - Sutton could not likely have offered as pithy a response. This Article indirectly poses a similar question - Why do you rob corporations? - to seven chief executive officers [CEOs] recently ensnared in circumstances not unlike Sutton's in the hope of generating answers more useful to the explanation, prediction, and suppression of corporate crime than simply, Because that's where the money is. In the last decade, a series of scandals involving insider trading, fraudulent accounting, fictional business entities, bribery, lavish executive perquisites, and outright theft destroyed over $1 trillion in shareholder value, eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs, and felled corporate giants such as Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, and Adelphia. Outrage at these breaches of the public trust, which some liken to a \"corporate 9/11,\" prompted prosecutors to imprison many senior executives and Congress to impose yet stricter obligations upon public firms and the executives who run them. Although the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is now associated in the public mind with a sordid parade of handcuffed executives perp walking their way to prison, in years to come SOX may be better remembered as the machine that privatized public corporations. As much as a quarter of every dollar a public firm earns is consumed complying with a panoply of laws and regulations, and in the first four years since its passage SOX alone has cost firms $1.8 trillion. While some commentators hail SOX as a significant weapon in the battle against corporate crime, others believe its price for reducing managerial malfeasance is far too dear. Many post-Enron Era firms now tout their compliance management programs [CMPs], which typically consist of written codes of ethics, new lines for chief compliance officers, internal systems for protecting whistleblowers, and mandated employee training, as proof against future corporate criminality. For their part, government regulators have encouraged and rewarded CMPs, reducing firms' liability upon violations of laws and regulations to the extent to which firms have actually implemented them. Still, many commentators remain skeptical, viewing CMPs as symbolic attempts to pose firms as corporate good citizens when in fact they are merely cheap ploys to reduce regulatory oversight without real behavioral transformation. Indeed, many of the most egregious offenders had implemented well-articulate","PeriodicalId":376821,"journal":{"name":"White Collar Crime eJournal","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122412982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Employee Crime, Monitoring, and the Efficiency Wage Hypothesis","authors":"W. Dickens, Lawrence F. Katz, K. Lang, L. Summers","doi":"10.3386/W2356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W2356","url":null,"abstract":"This paper offers some observations on employee crime, economic theories of crime, limits on bonding, and the efficiency wage hypothesis. We demonstrate that the simplest economic theories of crime predict that profit-maximizing firms should follow strategies of minimal monitoring and large penalties for employee crime. Finding overwhelming empirical evidence that firms expend considerable resources trying to detect employee malfeasance and do not impose extremely large penalties, we investigate a number of possible reasons why the simple model's predictions fail. It turns out that plausible explanations for firms large outlays on monitoring of employees also justify the payment of premium wages in some circumstances. There is no legitimate a priori argument that firms should not pay efficiency wages once it is recognized that they expend significant resources on monitoring.","PeriodicalId":376821,"journal":{"name":"White Collar Crime eJournal","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1987-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126676049","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}