Question titled: 

Do you agree that activities which can be found referenced as ‘financial crimes’ in key discourses are “among the most difficult crimes for the legal system to deal with, let alone control” (Tomasic (2011), 7)? 

Financial Crime is a larger problem than most give it credit for, often seen as a victimless or costless crime, since no one actually loses any “real” money from it. This idea is false, and needs combatting. According to the crime survey of England, there were 3.4 million incidents of fraud in the financial year 2016-17. The idea that “White collar and corporate crimes…are among the most difficult crimes for the legal system to deal with, let alone control”, as hypothesised by Tomasic, is a fairly agreeable statement to make, especially concerning the figures as reported by the National Crime Agency. 

I believe that this quote opens up and allows for analysis of the main problems with activities referenced as ‘financial crimes’, of which I believe there to be three main areas of discourse that surround the activities that are often referred to as ‘financial crimes’, these are definitional, legal, and political. These three broad areas lend themselves to analyse the question at hand, and, in my own belief, lead activities referred to as ‘financial crimes’ to suffer from a problem of perception, which further impacts on enforcement. I will firstly analyse this problem by looking at the global financial crisis of 2007-08 (GFC 
hereon), and then by giving a quick overview of the two non-definitional areas surrounding activities referred to as ‘financial crimes’. Although, due to the limit of the word count, I will not be able to analyse these as deeply as I would like to. 

The majority of this essay, will be tackling the definitional issues surrounding financial crime, adding that the current definitions used are a poor label for these activities. I will be arguing that not only are there too many labels to deal with, but also that these labels are ill-fitting of the crimes they define, these problems in turn impact on the perceptions of these crimes. Because of these poor labels lead to ‘financial crimes’ struggling to enter the public lexicon, and as a result are “often the most difficult crimes to deal with and control” as Tomasic argued, especially in the United Kingdom (UK hereon).

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