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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
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Results for business crime
6 results foundAuthor: Cook, David Title: An Analysis of the Situational Crime Prevention Techniques Used by Operation Kensington on a Selected Co-op Store Summary: It is apparent that shoplifting within England and Wales is a significant problem that seemingly needs more attention when it is estimated that seventy five per cent of shoplifting incidents go undetected (British Retail Consortium [BRC], 2007b, p. 1). The city of Portsmouth is an area that experiences a significant shoplifting problem. As a result Operation Kensington was set up by Hampshire Constabulary to try and tackle the problem. The scheme redesigned three Co-op stores in a pilot area with the purpose of making them more resistant to crime by using a series of situational crime prevention (SCP) techniques. It has been established that these SCP techniques can be successful in preventing crime and therefore the focus of this study was to assess whether the SCP techniques used by Operation Kensington have been successful in one of the three Co-op stores. The research study sought the views of two police officers who regularly deal with the selected Co-op store and two of the Co-op store workers in order to gain a varied perspective on the techniques. Crime data provided by Hampshire Constabulary was also analysed. On the available evidence the study has been unable to conclusively establish that the techniques used within the Co-op store have been effective. It does however appear that they may have been successful to some degree. The study is however able to say with some certainty that Operation Kensington as a whole as had some positive effects, most notably making the reporting of crime more efficient and leading to an increase in both reported and detected crime within the pilot area. Details: Portsmouth, UK: University of Portsmouth, Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, 2008. 99p. Source: Dissertation: Available at the Rutgers Criminal Justice Library Year: 2008 Country: United Kingdom URL: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/view.php?dis_id=10396&rtn=1 Shelf Number: 117095 Keywords: Business CrimeDisplacementShopliftingSituational Crime Prevention |
Author: KPMG Title: Independent Research into Crimes Against Businesses in Northern Ireland Summary: The aims of this research was to better understand the problem of business related crime in Northern Ireland and how businesses, business organisations and other relevant stakeholders believe it could be tackled and reduced. The research included a literature review; a postal survey of almost 5,000 non-agricultural businesses in Northern Ireland; focus groups among non-agricultural businesses and organisations representing business; semi-structured telephone interviews with representatives from agricultural businesses; and individual interviews with a range of businesses, organisations representing business and other stakeholders. Details: Dublin: KPMG, 2008. 95p. Source: Internet Resource Year: 2008 Country: United Kingdom URL: Shelf Number: 119508 Keywords: Business CrimeCommercial CrimesCrime PreventionRetail Crime |
Author: Ellison, Anna Title: Interim Evaluation of the National Illegal Money Lending Projects Summary: This report presents the findings and evidence from a review of the effectiveness of the illegal money lending national project that started in 2007. The project set out to address the illegal money lending which is common in deprived estates and which entrenches poverty and disadvantage. The review assesses the effectiveness of teams and delivery models in meeting both enforcement and financial inclusion objectives, and the aggregate impact of the national project. It identifies replicable best practice, assesses the wider economic and social benefits, to inform the development of future policy approaches in this area. Details: London: UK Department for Business Innovation and Skills, 2010. 105p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 25, 2010 at: http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/consumer-issues/docs/i/10-1186-interim-evaluation-illegal-money-lending Year: 2010 Country: United Kingdom URL: http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/consumer-issues/docs/i/10-1186-interim-evaluation-illegal-money-lending Shelf Number: 120065 Keywords: Business CrimeConsumer ProtectionFinancial Crimes |
Author: Australian Institute of Criminology Title: Serious and Organised Investment Fraud in Australia Summary: In 2011, Task Force Galilee was established to broaden the understanding of Serious and Organised Investment Fraud and to develop a national response. As at April 2012, the Task Force estimated that Australians’ losses to this type of fraud since January 2007 were in excess of A$113 million, with this figure likely to be conservative. During this period more than 2,600 Australians were victims of Serious and Organised Investment Fraud. These figures have largely been established as a result of intelligence analysis, and do not reflect the actual level of reporting by victims, which remains low. This report has been prepared to provide an insight into the nature and extent of this type of fraud as it currently affects Australia. Since the Task Force’s establishment, knowledge and understanding of Serious and Organised Investment Fraud has grown exponentially, and continues to do so. The information in this report is a compilation of the key characteristics identified via available literature and relevant Task Force member findings. The research and assistance of the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) is also acknowledged. This report uses the definition of Serious and Organised Investment Fraud which has been adopted by Task Force Galilee. This Task Force defines it as: a) any unsolicited contact, by telephone or internet, of persons in Australia (potential investors) by persons (callers) usually located overseas, where such callers engage in conduct that is fraudulent, false, misleading or deceptive with the purpose of inducing potential investors to buy, sell, or retain securities or other investments and where such callers do not have the license or authority to engage in a securities business, or investment advice business in Australia; and b) may include superannuation and investment fraud. The report is divided into three sections: •• Section 1: Characteristics of Serious and Organised Investment Fraud •• Section 2: Who is targeted by Serious and Organised Investment Fraud? •• Section 3: Current responses to Serious and Organised Investment Fraud Details: Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2012. 43p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed July 9, 2012 at: http://www.crimecommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/files/Galilee%202012/SOIFA_Report_040712.pdf Year: 2012 Country: Australia URL: http://www.crimecommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/files/Galilee%202012/SOIFA_Report_040712.pdf Shelf Number: 125518 Keywords: Business CrimeFinancial CrimesFraud (Australia) |
Author: United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime Title: Business, Corruption and Crime in Serbia: The impact of bribery and other crime on private enterprise Summary: This survey of businesses in Serbia reveals that corruption and other forms of crime are a great hindrance to private enterprise and have a negative effect on private investment. A significant percentage of businesses pay bribes to public officials repeatedly over the course of the year. Businesses in the Accommodation and Food service activities sector and the Transportation and Storage sectors combined are those most affected by bribery, followed by businesses in the Wholesale trade and Retail trade sector. The public officials with the highest risk of bribery in interactions with businesses are public utilities officers, police officers, municipal or provincial officers and customs officers. While indicators of corruption perceptions are undoubtedly useful for raising awareness, this survey measures the actual experience of corruption and crime through representative sample surveys of businesses in order to provide a more realistic, evidence-based assessment of corruption and crime affecting the business sector. In so doing it focuses on the extent and pattern of bribery by businesses from five different sectors (accounting for over 71.1 per cent of all businesses in Serbia) in their frequent interactions with the public administration. According to the survey, of all the businesses that had contact with a public official in the 12 months prior to the survey 17 per cent paid a bribe to a public official. The average prevalence of business bribery in Serbia is higher than the share of ordinary Serbian citizens (9.3 per cent) who experienced the same in UNODC's 2011 study on the general population. The examination of the experience of businesses that pay bribes to public officials underlines the fact that corruption plays a role in the daily business of many companies. Bribe-paying businesses pay an average of 7 bribes per year, or about one bribe every seven weeks. The prevalence of bribery is substantially higher among micro (up to 9 employees) businesses than among businesses of other sizes. A substantial share of all the bribes paid to public officials by businesses in Serbia are paid in cash (45.2 per cent), followed by the provision of food and drink in exchange for an illicit "favour" by the public official (25.5 per cent) and other goods (21.7 per cent). When bribes are paid in cash, the mean amount paid per bribe is 52,588 Dinar, or the equivalent of 935 EUR-PPP. As for which party actually broaches the subject of kickbacks, in 43.5 per cent of all bribery cases the payment of a bribe is offered by a representative of the business without a prior request being made, whereas in over half (56.1 per cent) of cases payment is either explicitly (16.2 per cent) or implicitly (22.4 per cent) requested by the public official or are paid after a third-party request (17.5 per cent). The most common purposes for paying bribes cited by businesses is to "speed up business-related procedures" (40.3 per cent of all bribes), "receiving better treatment" (19 per cent) and "making the finalization of a procedure possible" (11.3 per cent). At the same time, almost a quarter (23.4 per cent) of bribes paid serve for no specific immediate purpose for the businesses paying them, suggesting that these are "sweeteners" given to public officials to "groom" them for future interactions in the interest of the company. None of the businesses part of the survey had reported bribery incidents in the 12 months prior to the survey to official authorities in Serbia, which suggests that businesses often feel obliged to participate in bribery. This is also reflected in the main reasons cited for not reporting bribery: "it is common practice to pay or give gifts to public officials" (34.2 per cent), "it is pointless to report it as nobody would care " (30.8 per cent) and "the payment or gift was given as a sign of gratitude to the public servant for delivering the service requested " (21.6 per cent). Bribery in the private sector not only comprises bribes paid by businesses to public officials, it also takes place between businesses themselves in order to secure business transactions. Though lower than the prevalence of bribery between the private and public sector, at 6.6 per cent the prevalence of business-to-business bribery indicates that the practice does exist in Serbia. None of the businesses in the survey reported such business to business bribery incidents to relevant authorities. Some 9.2 per cent of business representatives decided not to make a major investment in the 12 months prior to the survey due to the fear of having to pay bribes to obtain requisite services or permits, thus the impact of bribery on business activity can be substantial. The consequences of other more conventional crimes on a business's property and economic activities can also be considerable, both in terms of direct costs stemming from physical damage and indirect costs in the form of insurance premiums, security expenditure and lost investment opportunities. For instance, more than one third of businesses (35.5 per cent) in Serbia fall victim to fraud by outsiders in various different guises in a year and such businesses are victimized an average of 10.1 times in that time period. Annual prevalence rates for burglary (10.2 per cent) and vandalism (9.5 per cent) in the private sector are also significant, as are the average number of times businesses affected fall victim to those crimes (4.4 and 2.8 respectively). The prevalence rate of motor vehicle theft (MVT) is 1.7 per cent of all car owning businesses, with victims suffering an average of 1.4 incidents. Moreover, over the past 12 months 1 per cent of all businesses in Serbia fell victim to extortion, a crime that can be linked to organized criminal groups. In marked contrast to corruption, a larger share of conventional crimes (on average, 41.8 per cent for five crime types) is reported to the police by businesses in Serbia. While the majority of business representatives (76.2 per cent) consider that the crime risk for their company has remained stable in comparison to the previous 12 months, around one in six (17.1 per cent) think it is on the increase and 2.8 per cent on the decrease. The fear of crime plays a very important role in the decision-making process of business leaders when it comes to making major investments. Although there are some differences by economic sector, on average one out of ten (10.6 per cent) entrepreneurs in Serbia state that they did not make a major investment in the previous 12 months due to the fear of crime. Yet while about 93.2 per cent of businesses in Serbia use at least one protective security system against crime, only 44.8 per cent have any kind of insurance against the economic cost of crime. Together corruption and other forms of crime place a considerable burden on economic development in Serbia. Putting in place more and better targeted measures for protecting businesses against crimes, as well as for preventing corruption (such as effective internal compliance measures and other policies concerning corruption) could make that burden considerably lighter. Details: Vienna: UNODC, 2013. 76p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed January 27, 2014 at: http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/corruption/Serbia_Business_corruption_report_ENG.pdf Year: 2013 Country: Serbia and Montenegro URL: http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/corruption/Serbia_Business_corruption_report_ENG.pdf Shelf Number: 131809 Keywords: BriberyBusiness CrimeCommercial CrimeCrime Against BusinessesCrime StatisticsPolitical Corruption |
Author: Mugellini, Giulia, ed. Title: Measuring and analyzing crime against the private sector: International experiences and the Mexican practice Summary: Crime is a crucial issue for businesses because it hampers their activities and threatens their profits by reducing and diverting their resources. It impacts on trade and investment decisions and may lead businesses to adopt non-optimal operating strategies. Given that businesses are at the core of the economy, crime against them may seriously limit societies' economic growth. The recent financial crisis makes it mandatory for both businesses and societies to allocate more wisely their resources and to understand how to minimize the losses as a consequence of crime. For this reason, studying the level and impact of crime against the private sector could provide crucial information in order to know how and where to allocate resources to prevent it, and therefore to reduce the costs of crime. Despite this need, research on crime against the private sector has been neglected in comparison to the study of crime against individuals. In 1993 (p. 39), Hibberd and Shapland noticed that "until the last few years there has been almost a complete dearth of in-depth investigation into crime committed against businesses and their employees". Broadhurst et al. (2011) further highlighted that while a vast literature addresses street crime and white-collar crime, little is known about businesses as victims of crime. A proper theoretical dissertation on crimes against businesses may have been somehow limited by the fact that scholars have tended to focus more on white collar crime and especially on crimes committed by corporations (Felson and Clarke, 1997). These two crime categories only partially overlap, while presenting different patterns, causes and effects. White collar crime is usually perpetrated by white-collar employees, or by enterprises themselves, who abuse their legitimate role for their personal and/or corporate gain, at the expense of other companies, of the customers, of the public sector, and even of the environment (Croall, 2001, Sjogren and Skogh, 2004, Salinger, 2005, Pontell, 2007). Crimes against businesses consist in any kind of offences targeted on private enterprises (including their employees) and on their activities. In this case, the company is not the offender but the victim. The dearth of knowledge in relation to crime against businesses has been also related to the fact that it has been considered for a long time to be a "victimless event". It was thought that businesses were better able to react to the event and face the losses better than households (Australian Institute of Criminology, 2004). For these reasons it attracted less attention than other types of crime. Its invisibility and complexity makes it not only difficult to detect but also difficult to investigate and measure. The most important sources of empirical information on crime and criminal justice still present several shortcomings in dealing with crimes against businesses. Some of these types of crime are not even dealt with by administrative statistics, or not enough details are collected for distinguishing between crime against businesses and crime against individuals (Burrow and Hopkins, 2005; Wagstaff et al., 2006). This led to the development of disparate studies carried out at local level, financed by business associations and most often not methodologically sound. Only in most recent years some large scale studies were developed in this field, even if a proper theoretical and methodological debate is still lacking at international level. This publication aims at providing both theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of crimes against businesses, supported by empirical examples and data from a wide range of studies. It deals with the several facets of this problem in order to depict each of them and to pave the way for future research. It considers various experiences at international level while focusing, in particular, on the Mexican business victimization survey as the most recent best practice in this field. The first chapter provides a conceptual definition of crimes against businesses and classifies them according to their victims and perpetrators. It reviews the main studies on this issue and it then demonstrates that victimization surveys are promising instruments for measuring these crimes, by evaluating their methodology and analyzing their outcomes. The second and third chapters analyse a specific subtype of crime against businesses, i.e. those offences perpetrated either by generic criminal groups or by specific Mafia-type organisations. The chapters describe the features of this issue by analyzing the situation of two countries, England and Wales and Italy. The results of the last Commercial Victimization Survey in England and Wales (2012) are analysed, as well as those of different Italian studies aimed at identifying and estimating the costs of Mafia-type organised crimes against the private sector. The fourth chapter depicts another important category of crimes against businesses: those committed by employees. Often undetected and dangerous for the companies' reputation, these offences are among the most frequent and most costly for the business community. The chapter analyses the results of the first victimization survey specifically carried out on employee offences: the Swiss Business Crime Survey (2010). The fifth chapter focuses on the most recent large-scale survey carried out at national level on the victimization of the private sector, the Mexican National Crime Business Survey (ENVE) (2012). It describes the reasons that drove to the conduction of such investigation and it analyses its methodological challenges as well as its main results. The sixth and last chapter analyses the existing experiences in the development of public policies aimed at preventing and limiting the economic impact of crime on enterprises. It demonstrates the importance of providing business stakeholders and policy makers with reliable data on crime against the private sector in order to prevent and contrast it more efficiently. Details: México : INEGI, 2013. 254p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 22, 2018 at: http://internet.contenidos.inegi.org.mx/contenidos/Productos/prod_serv/contenidos/espanol/bvinegi/productos/estudios/economico/Measuring/UNODOC_v6web2.pdf Year: 2013 Country: Mexico URL: http://internet.contenidos.inegi.org.mx/contenidos/Productos/prod_serv/contenidos/espanol/bvinegi/productos/estudios/economico/Measuring/UNODOC_v6web2.pdf Shelf Number: 153053 Keywords: Business CrimeCommercial Crime Corporate Crime Crimes Against Businesses Economic Crimes Economics of Crime Employee Theft White-Collar Crime |