Huh, I thought “fraud” was one of those categories that does indeed kind of criminalize a huge swath of behavior.
My model is that “fraud” (which includes e.g. tax evasion) is kind of the thing that prosecutors fall back on if they can’t pin anything else on you, but feel really confident that you did something wrong, like the famous case of convicting Al Capone primarily for tax evasion.
This suggests to me that the legal definition of fraud has a lot of degrees of freedom in it. I’ve heard it referenced as one of those things that might end up criminalizing a lot of relatively “normal” behavior (like I remember “wire fraud” as another one of these extremely general categories of crime that seems to often get used as a kind of catch-all of bad behavior using any kind of telecommunications).
This doesn’t mean that fraud isn’t a meaningful concept, or whatever, but I think it’s straightforwardly false that the legal definition of fraud points to a much more narrow subset than common-usage definitions. It’s probably somewhat narrower, as most legal concepts are, but I don’t think there is a huge disconnect between common-usage of fraud and the legal definition of it.
Fraud defined in this post is in business context—mismanagement, violation of internal controls or collusion, etc. The self defined position you are claiming Habryka for fraud is very different from what is acceptable in governance and internal audit standards that governs large organizations.
Huh, I thought “fraud” was one of those categories that does indeed kind of criminalize a huge swath of behavior.
My model is that “fraud” (which includes e.g. tax evasion) is kind of the thing that prosecutors fall back on if they can’t pin anything else on you, but feel really confident that you did something wrong, like the famous case of convicting Al Capone primarily for tax evasion.
This suggests to me that the legal definition of fraud has a lot of degrees of freedom in it. I’ve heard it referenced as one of those things that might end up criminalizing a lot of relatively “normal” behavior (like I remember “wire fraud” as another one of these extremely general categories of crime that seems to often get used as a kind of catch-all of bad behavior using any kind of telecommunications).
This doesn’t mean that fraud isn’t a meaningful concept, or whatever, but I think it’s straightforwardly false that the legal definition of fraud points to a much more narrow subset than common-usage definitions. It’s probably somewhat narrower, as most legal concepts are, but I don’t think there is a huge disconnect between common-usage of fraud and the legal definition of it.
Fraud defined in this post is in business context—mismanagement, violation of internal controls or collusion, etc. The self defined position you are claiming Habryka for fraud is very different from what is acceptable in governance and internal audit standards that governs large organizations.
My fraud 101 post is very relevant here:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/h7gnYAvEpqBxAr3Wr/fraud-101