Corporate fraud, governmental corruption, and medical fraud prevention

Corporate fraud as a dishonest activity for organizations that is considered as white collar crime has serious legal implications. Though it can be difficult to detect and catch, it is important to prevent it by creating effective and efficient policies for the organizations that ensure an efficient system of checks and balances exists in the organization for its physical and fiscal security. Whenever fraud happens in a company or organization, it often takes the form of hiding sources of revenue, overstating expenses or growth, or disguising payments made to individuals in the company. Often, fraudulent activities within the organization are complex in nature and have a gross impact on the financial nature of the organization. It is usually perpetrated by the company management and other employees are often unaware of these fraudulent activities (Mele, 2005).

Corporate fraud, as difficult as it is to prevent, often has a ripple effect whereby when one company collapses as a result of corporate fraud, other partner companies often feel this effect and sometimes even face collapse. When a company is involved in allegations of unethical behavior, for example accounting fraud, its stock falls fast and other companies in the same industry or sector and partner companies also feel the effect. There is need to ensure companies have strong accounting policies that prevent corporate fraud. These include having external auditors check and sign company expenditure and using internal controls in company accounting (Panda, 2006).

Governmental crimes and corruption

Corruption is an unethical deal undertaken by an individual such as embezzlement and bribery, often occurs when governmental employees acting in an official capacity do something for personal gain. It often takes the form of bribery, embezzlement, or extortion. Bribery is the situation whereby a government official receives an item such as money or favor to swing a decision in favor of the other party. Embezzlement occurs when the official spends money on personal items and disguises these payments as official. Lastly, extortion or blackmail is where the official threatens someone with violence, imprisonment, or exposure of their secrets in order to get them to agree to an action or decision.

Corruption amounts to abuse of office since the government official is using their official capacity for their own personal gain. It decreases transparency since these corrupt dealings are done in secret, and degrades the moral values of the government. Anti-corruption programs are targeted at catching these government officials taking bribes or ensuring strong practices such as internal controls in order to eliminate systemic corruption. It is important for these anti-corruption practices to be enforced and targeted to prevent officials that may choose to be corrupt from being corruptible (Bertrand, 2009).

Computer fraud

Computer or information technology fraud occurs when an individual or organization uses a computer to commit fraud. A good example is when a person alters electronic records of a company to issue checks payable to vendors in their own name. Therefore, according to the company, the payments are issued to the vendors but the actual checks are written in the name of the fraudulent individual. Denial of service or DDoS attacks are the more common form of computer fraud. It occurs when a person hacks into a company's website or bombards it with fraudulent requests to deny other web users access to the website.

Illegal data mining is also a type of computer fraud whereby the person or company collects information about their users without legally notifying them. It can also occur when a person hacks into a company's server and downloads databases of information about the company's managers or users. Using worms and viruses to attack a company or individual's computer networks is also part of computer fraud. Under the computer fraud and abuse act, it is illegal for a person to access a computer without authorization. It is also illegal for a person to acquire electronic information without authorization. This is what makes these actions prosecutable.