In this day and age, a corporation, family, or individual always has a potential risk of encountering fraud within their money supply. On average, fraud and abuse costs U.S. organizations more than $400 billion annually (Federal Bureau Investigation, 2010). Many may think that white collared crime is only money laundering or stealing, but that is only two out of the sum that countless culprits get away with. The term “white-collar crime,” originally coined in 1939 is synonymous with the full range of frauds committed by business and government professionals (Federal Bureau Investigation, 2010). These frauds include anything from bankruptcy fraud, money laundering, identity theft, corporate fraud to a wide number of threats all circling …show more content…
These crooks are the possible cause of ruining the reputation of the most trusted and appreciated professionals of our society – physicians. Healthcare fraud can be committed in a variety of ways, but three of the most widely used are described below. The first and most widely known, is billing services that were never endured by using general patient information. When giving personal information out, many hand it over to the front desk assistant at the local doctor. These appear to be people are some of the most known to scam the information and bill patient’s payments that never took place. Keep in mind that when handing over information, the handler is a trusted individual with a good reputation. On the other hand, many are scammed for the opposite; otherwise known as “upcoding,” where patients are billed more expensive services that were actually done. In fact, according to USA.gov a new study showed that 7 percent of identity fraud victims this year reported identity thieves stole their health insurance information, rising up from just 3 percent last year (Federal Bureau Investigation, 2010). This includes the latest scam, called “unbundling,” where scammers con bills and bill each step of a procedure as if it were a separate making the individual pay even more money, leaving devastating effects for the victim. All of which have a common goal of making taxpayers, insurance companies, and
Why discuss the development of the marketplace? Why is it central to the concept of white-collar crime?
Most people, when they hear the word “crime,” think about street crime or violent crime such as murder, rape, theft, or drugs. However, there is another type of crime that has cost people their life savings, investors’ billions of dollars, and has had significant impacts of multiple lives; it is called white collar crime. The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines white collar crime as
Currently, white collar crime is one of forms of crime that legal authorities are constantly combating. According to Hasnas (2004), a white collar crime is a non-violent crime committed by someone, especially to achieve financial realisation through deceit. The term “white collar crime” was coined by Edwin Sutherland in 1939 defining it as “crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation” (p. 579). This crime is usually brought to the attention of the police and other relevant authorities from information acquired from whistle blowers, auditors or forensic accountants. Perpetrators of this crime are mostly managers, executives or even office workers.
White-collar crime poses a vexing problem for the criminal justice system (CJS). It is an
White Collar Crimes and Drug Crimes both causes a big problem with our society. White Collar Crimes according to the film “The Business of White Collar Crime” as a crime committed by a person with respectability and a high social status in accordance to his occupation. While a drug crime is a crime where you have possession of drug paraphernalia or if you are manufacturing drugs. Another way to be charged with a drug crime is if you are trafficking and distributing drugs. Drug crimes can be done on a state and federal level. While white collar crimes is almost always tried on a federal level. A federal crime or federal offense is a violation of a crime that was made illegal by the United States federal government. If you violate a federal law you would be sent to a federal prison instead of a state prison.
Healthcare services have been on the rise for over 10 years now. According to a 2012 consumer alert, the industry provided $2.26 trillion in payments for more than four billion health insurance benefit claims in the year 2011(Fraud in Health Care). The bulk of the claims and the mainstream of fraud and abuse stem from the Medicare system professionals, who are knowledgeable about the process and persuade new clients into handing over their pertinent information in hopes of deception and illegitimate claims. Multiple and double billing, fraudulent prescriptions, are some of the major flaws in this organization that has made the healthcare services industry curdle. (AGHAEGBUNA, 2011) This is a non-violet crime and is often committed by very
Can "white collar" crime be explained by the same theories that address crimes such a domestic theft and burglary?
Anyone in the medical field may seem trustworthy because most of the time they are. Unfortunately, there are those individuals who seek financial gain and are no longer trustworthy. There is no exact amount of how much fraud has been committed within the health care system, because it usually is never detected. Like in the case of Dr. Guerrero who committed a healthcare fraud scheme against his patients, employees of the health care system, and health care insurances. According to Vivek Pande and Will Maas, Dr. Guerrero was able to commit fraud against clients and the health care system and insurance providers; it is an ingenious crime, because the public considers them intelligent and high achieving individuals. (Pande & Maas, 2013) Overall, health care providers have a choice
There are many theories and sub-theories on why white-collar crime occurs, just as there are many theories and sub-theories on why street crime occurs. However, as with any theory dealing with sociology, there are faults as human nature is hard to define generally.
Physicians in several places have a bad reputation due to billing fraud. These acts are committed by individuals and organizations to proceed personal or business advantage. In fact, health care fraud is a type of crime that may be committed by health care providers or companies which provide medical supplies or services, and health care organizations. It is a recent trend to which physicians and their practices are unfortunately doing by organized crime groups in complex health care fraud schemes.
In society we constantly encounter many different illicit acts and crime organizations. There is White Collar Crime, Organization Deviance, Corporate Crime and Organized crime. Many activities overlap one another but all of them eventually lead to an erosion of quality of life in society as it affects basic rights to peace, order and good government. Organized crime consists of a group of criminals who tend to participate in illicit activities usually in the purpose of making profit. There are many different groups that fall under this category such as human trafficking, money laundering, blackmailing, kidnapping, smuggling and drug trafficking amongst others.
White collar crime is often associated with crimes committed within businesses. These include different forms of fraud such as tax fraud, welfare fraud, money laundering, and property crime (Simpson & Benson, 2009: 42). These forms of white collar crime often have a huge impact on the welfare of the society in profound ways. For instance, according to an article authored by McGrath, a company that suffers losses from fraud must make up for this loss by for example raising the prices of its products. Hikes in prices would mean that consumers would be required to dig dipper into their pockets thus affecting their finances. The loss from fraud could also make the affected company to take drastic measures such as layoffs or implementing salary cuts for the employees (McGrath, n.d).
(Jones and Jing) Though citizens might not see the effects of health care fraud directly, everyone is impacted in one way or another either through increased taxes, high insurance costs, or the inability to afford health care coverage. While we all hear about major frauds in the system, a majority of the frauds are small and usually go through undetected, unreported, or seriously underreported. (Sparrow) These small frauds add up to be a huge problem. There is a large spectrum of frauds in the health-care systems ranging from the theft of a wheelchair, to organized crime groups that steal patient information and bill for phantom services in multimillion-dollar schemes. (Jones and Jing) In many cases, the fraud is minor but all the small scams add up to an enormous loss to the public. For example, the frequent occurrences of forging of a doctor’s signature on a prescription accounts for billions of dollars lost each year. (Jones and Jing) One of the most common crimes involves billing for services that were never performed. This involves a health care provider submitting a false claim to be paid for a patient that was never treated or adding on services to a patient. For example a doctor may obtain names of other people such as a patients spouse or child who are covered by insurance and put in a claim for them as well as the actual patient. (FBI) Another common fraudulent activity involves upcoding of services. This is when a healthcare
The concept of white-collar crime was first explained in the field of criminology by a professor known as Edwin Sutherland in the year 1941 (Sutherland, Geis & Goff, 1983). He defined this type of crime as a one which is committed by persons of respectability and high social class in the course of their occupation. Examples of such a crime include infringement of patents, false advertisements, publication of falsified information such as balance sheet for a particular business, concealment of defects in goods that are meant for sale and passing of products (Braithwaite, 1985). White collar crimes are such that the damage caused can spread to the whole public and to some extent the effect is always trifling.
Simply defined, white collar crime can be described as “A nonviolent crime committed for financial gain.” White collar crime can occur in the form of securities fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, and other illegal activities than generate financial returns outside of legal practices. In the extremely competitive business world, white collar crime and other scandals are unfortunately very common. Just recently one of the United States largest banking companies, Wells Fargo, was found to have generated over 3 million fake banking or credit card accounts. The source of these fake accounts stems from lofty sales goals set by the Wells Fargo management team. As employees struggle to meet goals and keep their jobs, good people can turn to bad and often illegal decisions to stay afloat.