For fraud, look under ‘serious and organized crime’

Simon Avery

Public Money & Management, 2020, vol. 40, issue 5, 407-414

Abstract: The UK government’s response to fraud cannot be disentangled from its broader ‘serious and organized crime’ (SOC) strategy. In order to explore whether fraud should—in public policy, criminal justice and law enforcement terms—be seen primarily as an SOC issue, there is a need to consider questions about whether or not ‘SOC’ is a sensible object of policy-making in the first place. Several arguments in favour of an SOC policy are identified in the paper. However, the notion of an overarching SOC policy is problematic for three reasons. First, SOC is a fundamental misrepresentation of reality, which does not correspond to a real social problem. Second, SOC policy can limit the development of more problem-specific crime strategies, Third, the ‘SOC’ label can negatively transform how social problems are perceived over the long term. If fraud is to be better understood and dealt with, it may therefore be necessary to extract it from its current inclusion within wider SOC strategy.This paper argues that fraud has been subsumed by ‘serious and organized crime’ policy. It explores both the benefits and problems of this state of affairs and questions the validity of ‘serious and organized crime’ as an object of policy-making. It is hoped the paper will encourage policy-makers and practitioners to think carefully about how fraud is conceptualized as a problem.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09540962.2020.1714903 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:pubmmg:v:40:y:2020:i:5:p:407-414

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RPMM20

DOI: 10.1080/09540962.2020.1714903

Access Statistics for this article

Public Money & Management is currently edited by Michaela Lavender

More articles in Public Money & Management from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().