Temat: An Integrated Model of White Collar Criminality in Banking

The latest banking scandal at Wells Fargo has resurrected the perennial debate about White Collar Crime (WCC) in the banking industry. There was definitely fraud at Wells but who exactly was responsible and why they did it are the real questions that are raised by yet another example of misconduct in the banking industry.

As others have noted, there is little about WCC that has been settled, even the term is still a subject of debate, many decades after Edwin Sutherland attempted a definition. [For those interested, read the excellent (best?) book on “The Criminal Elite: Understanding White-Collar Crime” by James Coleman]

Much of the debate and the problem with the various definitions of WCC is that there is a concentration on the individual, that is the deviant who, unbeknownst to his (or less frequently her) colleagues, is beavering away defrauding the system.




There are millions of 'incidents', usually mistakes, in business every year that typically cause relatively minor losses (although in some industries deaths can occur because of workplace mistakes). This is borne out by the work of Frank Bird in the 1960s who painstakingly analyzed thousands of workplace incidents to find that the vast majority of incidents are of minor consequence (> 500:1).

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