Similarities Between Corporate Crime And White Collar Crime

Corporate crime is a form of fraud that is closely related to “white-collar crime,” which takes place in business organizations and other corporate institutions such as banks, manufacturing industries, and non-governmental organizations. Unlike organized crime which may involve illegal street activities such as kidnappings and cross-border operations like drug trafficking, corporate crime involves “clean jobs” like manipulation of accounting records by finance officers, insider trading, misappropriation of funds, tax evasion, etc. However, both forms of crime require some degree of financial, social or political influence to be successfully carried out. This is because although organized crime is not exclusive to a specific race, profession or class, “many studies have shown that those with power, influence, and respectability in local, regional, national, or international society have tended to organize crime more successfully and securely than those without” (Woodwiss, 2001, p. 3). Further, as Edwin Sutherland (1939) once observed, corporate crime is a large-scale version of white collar crime, because it involves people of high-class society, committed in the course of their occupation. Thus, the two forms of crime (white-collar and corporate) overlap each other because they all happen within similar environments, in which the incentives are high for an

In certain circumstances, whereby perpetrators of organized crime may need to “clean” ill-gotten wealth, such as drug trafficking money, they may set up legitimate corporations for the purpose of money laundering. Therefore, corporate crime may relate with organized crime in that sometimes the former benefits financially from the latter (such as using mafia money as business capital), while corporate activities are used as a front to legitimize illegal wealth through money