The Invisible Act

When cheaters are invisible, there is surge in crime levels. When victims are invisible; result is the same.

It was almost an hour after the midnight. You could hardly hear your own voice due to the loud heart beating music in the pub. The auditor on a surprise visit who was not known to the bartender was trying to give cash to buy a drink. The bartender shouted that he needs coupons as taking cash is not allowed. The auditor shouted back, don't you know me, I come here every month; I always have paid cash here and no body denied it earlier. The bartender smiled and came closer and whispered - sorry sir, but we are being watched today.

Let's ponder on the above phenomena by way of a short story. A student named Vishnu Prasad Singh puts on a magical bracelet and founds that it made him invisible. With no one able to monitor his behavior, he proceeded to do woeful things - seduce a girl, murder her boy friend, and so on. This story posed a moral question, could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed.

Paul Feldman's research says although there is no economic benefit in living a morale life, there is evidently some principles in man's nature, which interests him to do so. The research goes on to conclude that 87 % of the times people are honest and do not cheat. His research explains that cheating activities change with weather conditions, economic and political scenarios, and even they are different with different days of the year. Paul's estimate of 87 % is subject to presence of reasonable level of internal controls and safe guarding of the assets as appropriate.

Working environment, size of office and nature of boss are also among the factors which affect the level of cheating by the white collars. His research also found out that employees up the corporate ladder cheat more than those down below. Possibly this is due to the reason that they are not being monitored as much as the people down below. ( Alarm for Audit Committee !!!)

Although, we are aware and have read about many white collar crimes, we know very little about practicalities of the white collar crime at the various levels. The reason is that there are very few cases which have been reported and have come to light and the most of the embezzlers lead quite and theoretically happy lives as they have not been detected.

When you don't know who the victims of white collar crimes were, you also don't know with what frequency or in what magnitude it happened. Now there is a question - from whom, exactly, did the master of Enron steal? These cheaters had remained invisible to the victims and vise versa.

Amazingly, the silent theft of our shared wealth has gone largely unnoticed because we have lost our ability to see the commons. What to say about the white collars who are amongst us.