Conceal Or Reveal? Reporting White-Collar Crime

Key Point

• Corporate victims of white collar crime may decide not to report it to the police for many reasons, but that failure may itself be a criminal offence.

Frequently, the first entity (apart from the criminal) which becomes aware of the commission of a white collar crime is the corporation which employs the criminal, because the corporate employer is also the victim of the crime.

An employer's priorities will normally be to achieve reimbursement of the missing funds and termination of the perpetrator's employment. Reporting of the criminal conduct to the Police (or other appropriate authority) is not necessarily uppermost among the employer's priorities, which may sometimes consider that the matter is best dealt with in house, without involving the Police or other authorities.