NCJ Number
82638
Journal
Monatsschrift fuer Kriminologie und Strafrechtsreform Volume: 63 Issue: 6 Dated: (December 1980) Pages: 397-407
Date Published
1980
Length
11 pages
Annotation
Criminal sanctions against white-collar abuses should strengthen and uphold norms defined by economic sector regulations and combat acts that threaten to disrupt those norms.
Abstract
West German laws and legislative proposals against white-collar crime aim at specific offense types, e.g., unfair competitive practices, usury, fraud, check and credit abuses, computer crimes, etc. Because diverse acts constitute white-collar crime, legislation in this area cannot be comprised by a single, uniform body of law. Lawmaking that concerns the conduct of business is further complicated by the nature of the economic system, which tolerates only minimal government interference for the protection of an essentially free market. Preventive measures originating from within the economic order itself are preferable to reactive criminal sanctions, which should be brought into play only as a last resort. A positive example of coordinated normative reform is the subsidy law of 1976, which outlawed subsidy abuses at the same time that regulations for subsidy administration were revised to delineate specifics of eligibility and potential abuse. On the other hand, law reform has failed to curb usury because its prohibition against 'exhorbitant' interest rates is difficult to prosecute in the absence of better defined credit regulations in the money market. A total of 48 footnotes are provided.