White-collar crime

Abstract

Policing religious organizations presents challenging situations. When there is suspicion of financial crime by white-collar criminals, secrecy and trust represent obstacles to law enforcement. This article discusses the lack of detection and neutralization techniques often applied in religious organizations. There may be too much trust, too much freedom, too much individual authority, too little scepticism, too much loyalty and too little control of the financial side in religious organizations. There may be no empirical evidence for the proposition that religion has a deterrent effect on crime, although sociologists and criminologists have long recognized potential links between religious belief and delinquent behaviour.

Empirical Testing of an Integrated Criminological Theory: The Case of Deductive Convenience for White-Collar Offenders

“…A test of convenience theory by survey research will need to distinguish different kinds of organizations. For example, Gottschalk (2017) found that religious institutions tend to have members with weaker personal willingness to commit financial crime, while the organizations themselves offer greater opportunities to commit and conceal financial crime. Other kinds of organizations -such as museums, family-owned enterprises, small and medium-sized business versus multinational corporations, and public organizations -will all have different and special characteristics.…”