But maybe I misunderstood who this advice is aimed towards. Some secretary making 50k a year who engages in some light fraud by padding expense reports or something is very unlikely to be able to afford a defense attorney to negotiate a plea before being charged.
I mean once they charge you then you can get appointed a public defender but -- as I understand it -- you can't take advantage of that until some kind of criminal process is started against you which kinda undermines the point.
If this advice is specifically aimed at people in better paid finance jobs then I retract my other objections. Those people probably aren't padding expenses by a few percent and your analysis seems more persuasive.
But do we actually know that most fraud -- even unplanned -- requires a snowballing sequence of coverups? Or is it just that this is the kind of fraud that gets caught? I'd guess that most fraud is actually like lying on your taxes. If no one notices within a couple years they probably never will notice.
Yes, obviously if you engage in fraud that's large in scope relative to the money you manage that's different. But my guess is that most fraud is essentially the accounting equivalent of pocketing a bit of change that should have gone to the customer. That is you aren't appropriating some big pile of money to yourself you are siphoning off a few hundred bucks out of every $5,000 spent on some account.
For these individuals, they will eventually get caught if they continue but if they were my friend I'd not encourage confession unless it seemed more obvious they are going to get found out. The key thing is really getting under control the underlying issue that caused them to steal -- whether it's drug abuse or just making sure they have someone besides payday lenders to turn to -- because especially for people without substantial social capital the harms of being a felon are sufficiently bad that you might want to risk a larger sentence in the hope of avoiding that status. Indeed, if you make an effort to sneak the money back in you probably will realize a good part of whatever sentence reduction you might have negotiated the first time.
But maybe I misunderstood who this advice is aimed towards. Some secretary making 50k a year who engages in some light fraud by padding expense reports or something is very unlikely to be able to afford a defense attorney to negotiate a plea before being charged.
I mean once they charge you then you can get appointed a public defender but -- as I understand it -- you can't take advantage of that until some kind of criminal process is started against you which kinda undermines the point.
If this advice is specifically aimed at people in better paid finance jobs then I retract my other objections. Those people probably aren't padding expenses by a few percent and your analysis seems more persuasive.
But do we actually know that most fraud -- even unplanned -- requires a snowballing sequence of coverups? Or is it just that this is the kind of fraud that gets caught? I'd guess that most fraud is actually like lying on your taxes. If no one notices within a couple years they probably never will notice.
Yes, obviously if you engage in fraud that's large in scope relative to the money you manage that's different. But my guess is that most fraud is essentially the accounting equivalent of pocketing a bit of change that should have gone to the customer. That is you aren't appropriating some big pile of money to yourself you are siphoning off a few hundred bucks out of every $5,000 spent on some account.
For these individuals, they will eventually get caught if they continue but if they were my friend I'd not encourage confession unless it seemed more obvious they are going to get found out. The key thing is really getting under control the underlying issue that caused them to steal -- whether it's drug abuse or just making sure they have someone besides payday lenders to turn to -- because especially for people without substantial social capital the harms of being a felon are sufficiently bad that you might want to risk a larger sentence in the hope of avoiding that status. Indeed, if you make an effort to sneak the money back in you probably will realize a good part of whatever sentence reduction you might have negotiated the first time.