If you have been charged with a white-collar crime in Indiana, you most likely understand that the consequences of such a charge can be very serious. Additionally, white-collar crimes have victims who are hurt in different ways and sometimes the aftereffects of such a crime are far-reaching.
A white-collar crime can bring down a business, decimate a person’s life savings, cost people millions or billions of dollars and completely destroy the public’s trust in institutions. If you have been charged with a white-collar crime, you are probably facing a long, arduous road in front of you.
Some government agencies, such as the FBI, concentrate on analyzing intelligence and solving complicated investigations. White-collar crimes are often involving organized crime. The white-collar crime investigations can be on a local, national and/or international level. Although it is the mission of the FBI to investigate white-collar crimes, it often partners with other government law enforcement and regulatory agencies, such as the following:
- Securities and Exchange Commission
- Internal Revenue Service
- U.S. Postal Inspection Service
- Commodity Futures Trading Commission
- Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
What are some examples of white-collar crimes?
There are several examples of white-collar crimes and each one is complicated in its way.
- Health care fraud: This type of crime affects many people and many businesses. Also, tens of billions of dollars are lost annually because of health care fraud. Health care fraud can affect insurance premiums for everyone who has insurance, cause people to become vulnerable because they are exposed to medical procedures that are not necessary and make taxes go up. Many different players have the potential to commit health care fraud, including medical providers, patients and other people who purposely try to deceive the health care system in order to gain benefits and money.
- Corporate fraud: Some examples of this are accounting schemes by corporate executives who self-deal and who obstruct justice. When this type of fraud is being investigated, the focus is usually on false accounting and/or financial conditions being misrepresented.
- Fraudulent trades: These are built to inflate profits or conceal losses.
- Escaping regulatory oversight: Transactions that are intentionally designed to escape from regulatory oversight.
- Self-dealing by corporate people on the inside
- Insider trading
- Kickbacks
- Misusing corporate property for personal profit
- Tax violations related to self-dealing
- Money laundering
- Hiding and gathering wealth
- Avoiding prosecution
- Avoiding taxes
- Increasing profits by reinvesting the money
- Funding additional criminal activity
What do you do if you have been charged with a white-collar crime?
Considering how serious a white-collar crime is, you probably what to build your defense as quickly as possible so that you have the best chance of a relatively favorable outcome. You will need to take responsibility for what you have done and to protect your rights and then you can move on and get on the correct path so that you can look forward to living a more pure life than in the past.