White-Collar Crime Detection

Abstract

In Norway, 405 white-collar offenders were convicted and imprisoned between 2009 and 2016. Journalists detected 25 percent of these criminals, followed by crime victims, bankruptcy attorneys, internal auditors, tax authority clerks, bank employees, external auditors, and police officers. Many of these detections were based on whistleblowing to external journalists, internal auditors, and others. The sum of money involved in crime is significantly larger in cases detected by journalists. Only 5 percent of the criminals in our sample were detected by auditors. Signal detection theory may shed some light on why some actors discover and disclose more white-collar crime than others. It holds that the detection of a stimulus depends on both the intensity of the stimulus and the physical and psychological state of the individual. This book is concerned with the magnitude of white-collar crime. We define convicted white-collar criminals as the tip of an iceberg. Based on expert elicitation, we have estimated the tip to be only 9.2 percent of the total iceberg, since 1.1 billion NOK are detected annually, while the estimated magnitude is 11.9 billion NOK annually.