Criminal law regulators face difficulties in adapting to technological change. They must often operate in environments of significant uncertainty, with changing policy aims and legislative provisions that fail to ‘move with the times’. Rather than engaging with robust, let alone radical theoretical examination of their actions and structure, regulatory organisations struggle to enforce laws in communities affected by technological or systemic change, often leading to claims of overcriminalisation, inadequacy, regulatory overreach or inconsistency. This article suggests that dealing with disruptive criminality solely through legal instruments is a policy failure. Instead, a radical new framework is proposed, embedded in cybernetics (a transdiscplinary approach to exploring regulatory systems). Such a framework — systemic governance — offers a substantially altered way of managing regulatory relationships that resists disruptive change and challenges regulators to find new ways of engaging with the population they seek to influence.
Purpose Financial crime costs the world economy more than $1tn. Yet policing responses continue to apply traditional law enforcement methods to detect, identify and disrupt criminal actors in financial systems. The purpose of this paper is to challenge existing thinking around law enforcement practices in financial crime within an Australian context, by presenting an alternative model grounded in management cybernetics and systemic design (SD), which the author terms “cyber-systemics”. Design/methodology/approach This study reflects on prior research work across cybernetics and SD to suggest an integrated approach as a conceptually useful basis for considering regulation of financial crime, and to demonstrate utility using a case study. Findings The Fintel Alliance between financial crime regulators and financial institutions in Australia demonstrates a strong connection with, and example of, this study’s cyber-systemic regulatory framework. It will be demonstrated that the form of co-design framework offered under cyber-systemics is both consistent with cybernetic and SD literature, but also a means of avoiding regulatory disconnection in times of change and disruption. This study also invites consideration of how future forms of governance might be structured using cyber-systemics as a conceptual backbone. Research limitations/implications This work proposes a novel methodology at odds with traditional law enforcement ways of doing, inevitably requiring a change of regulatory mindset. In addition, this paper is purely conceptual and therefore more research on an empirical basis is required to prove the potential benefits in a real-world regulatory environment. Originality/value This is (to the author’s knowledge) the first conceptual exploration of blending SD and management cybernetics in the field of criminal law regulation.
The black economy—also called the hidden, covert, underground, grey, illicit, or cash economy—is used to describe the aspect of a country's economy that is not visibly subject to taxation. However, it is also a useful measure of behavioral disruption to the taxation system, as the scale and tactics of black economy participants vary over time. The purpose of this chapter is to suggest that existing tax policy (where legal constraints alone are used) is insufficient to affect black economy behaviour. It suggests that by adopting responses that are “more than law,” revenue administrations can deploy a more advanced and effective approach to improve tax compliance and can decrease the negative impacts of the black economy.
Disruption poses a unique challenge for regulatory agencies, particularly those with a focus on criminal law. Yet regulatory scholarship focuses on and elevates the concepts of risk without addressing the actors and agents that populate the regulated environment. This article has three main aims. The first of these aims is to use disruption as a conceptual lens to critique the predominant regulatory theories and highlight some of their weaknesses. The second is, by reference to the principles set forth by Foucault and Deleuze, to identify some of the fundamental principles that could apply to a post-regulatory State to enable them to be more successful in the disrupted environment. The third is to examine the case of China as an empirical example of how some elements of that system have been employed in the real world. The article closes with some considerations of possible future areas of discussion.
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