White - collar crime.

Crimes committed by business people, professionals, and politicians in the course of their occupation are known as " white-collar" crimes, after the typical attire of their perpetrators. Criminologists tend to restrict the term to those illegal actions intended by the perpetrators principally to further the aims of their organizations rather than to make money for themselves personally. Examples include conspiring with other corporations to fix prices of goods or services in order to make artificially high profits or to drive a particular competitor out of the market; bribing officials or falsifying reports of tests on pharmaceutical products to obtain manufacturing licenses; and constructing buildings or roads with cheap, defective materials. The cost of corporate crime in the United States has been estimated at $200, 000, 000, 000 a year. Such crimes have a huge impact upon the safety of workers, consumers, and the environment, but they are seldom detected. Compared with crimes committed by juveniles or the poor, corporate crimes are very rarely prosecuted in the criminal courts, and executives seldom go to jail, though companies may pay large fines. The term white-collar crime is used in another sense, by the public and academics, to describe fraud and embezzlement. Rather than being crime " by the firm, for the firm, " this constitutes crime for profit by the individual against the organization, the public, or the government. Tax fraud, for example, costs at least 5 percent of the gross national product in most developed countries. Because of the concealed nature of many frauds and the fact that few are reported even when discovered, the cost is impossible to estimate precisely. The economic cost of white-collar crime in most industrial societies is thought to be much greater than the combined cost of larceny, burglary, auto theft, forgery, and robbery.