The Enforcement of Financial Market Crimes in Canada and the United Kingdom

This piece undertakes a comparative analysis of the enforcement of financial market crimes in Canada and the United Kingdom. In both jurisdictions, financial market crimes have low enforcement rates for a multiplicity of reasons common to both jurisdictions. First, financial market crimes appear to be a relatively low priority for law enforcement officials who are required to devote increasing resources to violent crimes. Second, law enforcement infrastructure lacks financial resources which undermines the investigation and prosecution of financial market crime and fraud cases. Third, technology has allowed new types of fraud to develop, with insufficient human and financial resources to deal with them. Fourth, past treatment of financial market criminals as pillars of the community who have merely had a fall from grace has weakened public perceptions of the harm caused by these crimes. Despite the existence of agencies and regulators specially designated to address these issues, there seems to be no formal and effective strategy in either jurisdiction to tackle the problem of financial market enforcement. The problems with enforcement are not exclusively legal, and cannot be solved through legal reform alone. Nevertheless, reform to the law is essential in both jurisdictions. In particular, as this chapter argues, reforms should dedicate greater resources to financial market criminal enforcement, introduce principles-based regulation, and facilitate inter-agency coordination, as well as pursue other targeted regulatory reforms.