History Of Corporate And White Collar Crime

Corporate and White Collar Crime is crime that is done by businesses or individuals who are doing crimes that involve with business. Despite most people not thinking about white collar crime when they think of crime, white collar crime is the most recurring and damaging type of crime. Most of us have been victims of white collar crime without even knowing about it. From cases such as Charles Ponzi’s and Bernie Madoff’s ponzi schemes to Enron’s whole business practice, white collar crime is deep within society and has been there throughout history. White collar crime still goes on strong these days as shown by the case of Judge Mark A. Ciavarella and the case of Health South. White collar crime does not only happen in the United States, it can

This is seen by Judge Mark A. Ciavarella in the “Kids for Cash” case. Ciavarella was a judge in Pennsylvania in for over a decade. In 2008, Ciavarella and another judge were convicted of secretly accepting over 2.6 million dollars from owners of the local child detention center, PA Child Care. The owners of the child detention centers would secretly give Ciavarella money for sending kids to PA Child Care, thus adding more residents to their youth centers and making the child care center more money. Ciavarella would send juveniles to the PA Child Care youth center for prolonged amounts of time for little offenses such as sending a young man to three years in one of the youth centers for unknowingly owning an stolen motorcycle, while the boy’s parents had their charges dropped (Ecenbarger, 2014). Ciavarella did similar things to over five thousand children during his time as judge, from 1997 to 2008 (Chen, 2009). These acts costed the state four million dollars due to excessive detention costs. For these acts, Ciavarella was found guilty of racketeering, conspiracy, and tax charges by a jury in 2008 (“Ciavarella Won't Fight for $250K Pension”,

In this case, a company known as HealthSouth was charged with accounting fraud in 2003. HealthSouth made over 2.7 Billion dollars in accounting frauds. Thirty-seven percent of HealthSouth’s profit came from Medicare. The CEO of HealthSouth, Richard Scrushy, seen that many health-care facilities would get a lot of money from Medicare and Scrushy decided to make a business model that will allow HealthSouth to get even more money from the government due to Medicare. In 1997, the government cut Medicare reimbursements and this led to HealthSouth losing a large amount of their profits. After that, HealthSouth’s net income went down eighty-six percent until 1999 where their net income rose five hundred percent despite their sales only growing five percent. Scrushy said the reason for this was because they lowered costs while rising revenues, but the reality was that all the earnings were actually fake. This was done because Scrushy felt pressure to keep growing HealthSouth as in the 1990s, it was believe shareholders cared more the revenues companies were getting instead of how profitable the company was. This was accomplished by managers being told to fix the results of income if it looked low and creating false documents to make the false statements look real. The fraud was brought to the attention of Ernst & Young when a bookkeeper at HealthSouth named, Michael Vines, left the company