In my experience as an accountant for 10 plus years
My impression is that in the business world, “fraud” is pointing at a cluster of actions that’s more specific than most simple definitions. I’d assume that there are incredibly few cases where businesses are actually in situations where they feel they need to commit fraud to save a life or similar, especially in Western countries.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were even legal loopholes for these extreme hypothetical-like situations. Like, the person could say they were under effective duress.
My guess is that basically any of us would agree to hypotheticals or thought experiments that were wild enough. Like, “What if you knew with absolute certainty that America would be completely nuked unless your business commits a tiny amount of fraud? Would you do it then?”
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 impression is that in the business world, “fraud” is pointing at a cluster of actions that’s more specific than most simple definitions. I’d assume that there are incredibly few cases where businesses are actually in situations where they feel they need to commit fraud to save a life or similar, especially in Western countries.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were even legal loopholes for these extreme hypothetical-like situations. Like, the person could say they were under effective duress.
My guess is that basically any of us would agree to hypotheticals or thought experiments that were wild enough. Like, “What if you knew with absolute certainty that America would be completely nuked unless your business commits a tiny amount of fraud? Would you do it then?”
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