Questions 8-9 White-Collar Crime And Bribery Versus Extortion

Questions 8-9
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Q1 White-Collar Crime and Bribery versus Extortion
A white-collar crime is a non-violent crime which is committed for financial gain. Ordinarily, it may involve monetary losses resulting in connection with business transactions or government-related functions. The common types of white collar crimes may include fraud, bribery, and forgery among others. Some elements of identifying white-collar crimes include their non-violent nature. White-collar crimes are usually non-belligerent since there is almost no violent involved. It does not involve crimes like robbery and burglary. The second element is that these crimes involve money, the perpetrators of these white-collar crimes do it for their own financial gains. It is also important to note that these crimes have some kind of financial component even if they are sensationalized to have other aspects. The third aspect is the social status of the perpetrators, generally, white-collar crimes are committed by individuals of higher social class like organizational chief executive officers.
Two federal criminal statutes that government agencies may use when convicting white-collar criminals are Sarbanes-Oxley Act which was enacted in 2002. This Act is commonly used because it helps in promoting corporate governance and accountability. This is because it examines the reaction of an organization to criminal conduct involving its workers and the response of an organization to regulatory actions (Office of the Legislative Counsel, 2018). The IRS Whistleblower Program also plays a major role in issues related to tax evasion, underpayment and tax fraud. Since perpetrators of tax evasion may be imprisoned for a period of not more than five years, individuals and companies are afraid of indulging into activities related to tax fraud.
Bribery and extortion are both criminal offenses and they have many elements in common, they may involve an exchange of money, property or service. The primary difference between bribery and extortion is that in bribery, the giver is the initiator of a transaction and the receiver is also offering something to the giver. While in extortion, the receiver is the initiator of a transaction, and the receiver is not offering anything to the giver. It is important to understand these differences because the punishments for this criminal offenses are different. For bribery, the punishment consists of a fine and up to five years behind bars while for extortion, the perpetr...