That's either alot of corruption that's been caught due to whistleblower rewards or an indication of the amount of corruption in the US if you are more cynical.
Whsitleblower's are eligible for 10 to 30% of the money collected from fines, so the SEC is also making alot of money from this as well.
Here's the list they maintain if you want to look:
Given a stock market of around $100T (and the SEC covers more than stocks) it would argue for a rather small amount of corruption, were it the only signal.
In fact I believe the corruption at this level is quite small. Really, why bother when you can do it wholesale (e.g. telecoms simply capturing the regulators)?
> Whsitleblower's are eligible for 10 to 30% of the money collected from fines, so the SEC is also making alot of money from this as well.
These fines go to the treasury; it's not like they fund operations from it.
BTW civil forfeiture, if you even believe in it at all, should go to the state or federal general funds. The current system is simply legalized theft.
That is still corruption. Sufficiently provable and easy to convict corruption might be small. Quid pro quo corruption where nothing is in writing is huge.
This idea that a little badness is more efficient than no badness has played out multiple times in the past and one thing we’ve learned repeatedly is that humans are pretty bad at understanding and accounting for the full and true economic costs of a little badness, especially the humans that are making money. More often than not the damage done by badness is externalized and the costs ignored by the people who are profiting from the environment that tolerates the badness.
There are plenty of examples of this from the environment to product safety standards to the stock market. It was argued (fiercely) that the costs of seatbelts in cars was too high a price to pay for something that wasn’t helping every driver - most people, after all, don’t crash. This flawed thinking completely failed to capture the economic costs of car accidents, and today very few people even in the auto industry would disagree or even think of arguing against seatbelts.
We still don’t grasp the economic costs of pollution. We’re just starting to see the economic damage that allowing a little badness has had over the last century, and it’s already many orders of magnitude higher than most people thought several decades ago.
Similary, we’ve not really tallied the economic costs of poor people who’ve been pushed into bankruptcy by financial corruption. The growing inequality driven in part by lack of financial regulation is almost certainly fueling our political unrest, which we of course haven’t measured economically, and might not end well.
It’d still be basically legalized theft even if it went to state/federal treasury.
There should be no such thing as a civil asset fortfeiture.
Well yes, I agree, I;m just pointing out the perverse incentive in how it is done.
1. Had the whistle blown
2. Were investigated
3. Had enough evidence found during the investigation
4. Were fined successfully
5. Were announced via the SEC whistleblower program
Nobody knows the dropoff at every stage but it's certainly non-zero and so we can't judge the level of crime based on the number we know coming out at stage 5.
I don't think it's overly cynical to assume that 278 is a small percentage of the actual count of financial crimes in the US since 2012.
We'll never know the exact details, but we can still piece together a statistical model of the world from the evidence we do have:
We can compare it to similar systems, for example. Murderers have to go through similar steps, so one might reasonably conclude that high-value financial crimes are less common than murder. If there are other countries with similar programs, we could also compare our number to theirs.
Plus, why would that comparison be useful? Everyone is capable of murder, not everyone is even in a position where they could attempt to commit the types of crimes that get announced via the whistleblower program. So if we were to compare, it would have to be some kind of per capita comparison, where the population for financial crimes is members of the financial industry. In which case the numbers start to look more damning.
For corruption within the government, you can report it to an inspector general (there is a different inspector general for each government agency), although there is not typically a financial reward associated with such a report.