But it's not about eliminating fraud, is it?
When you function within a uniquely designed to be fragmented and complex economic system where no one can truly define money and the legal system is fundamentally a for-profit business — grasping the extent of impact corporate financial crimes, shielded by legal structures by the way, have on our world is a big undertaking.
Certainly, I'm not saying that individuals do not commit financial crimes, I'm rather saying that biggest of crimes costs money and power and last I checked, the average Joe is poor and certainly does not have the backing of the legal system.
When Elon Musk agreed to the idea of putting the United States Treasury on the blockchain in an attempt to eliminate wasteful spending and crimes in the system, half the internet, on X at least, lost their shit.
Even people who should not have, did anyways. A supposed proponent of blockchain technology, as self-proclaimed, went on to write and publish a piece on Fortune.com on why putting the treasury on-chain would be a threat to national security.
The argument here was that everyone could see every bit of details on military spending and “hackers” would connect the dots, bla bla bla.
Alright, that's a cool opinion bro, then let's put everything on-chain except military spending then. What other threat to national security are you going to come up with now?
We can be sure that someone is going to come up with some different excuse on why transparency should not be expected of the government. So if the government itself is a fraud, leveraging national funds to commit crimes that ultimately lead to monetary gains for the individuals involved, what then can be expected of Big Corps that have significant craws in the government and essentially run it?
There's far more crimes within Corporations
Most people consider the concept of the legal system being a literal shield for Big Corps to be a conspiracy, even though there's lots of evidence to back it up.
It's almost too easy to prove that the legal system shields Big Corps and essentially outs themselves as a for-profit business that doesn't care about justice, just revenue(income) for individual pockets.
But what qualifies as a financial crime anyways?
Financial crimes are illegal acts committed by individuals or organizations to gain financial or economic benefits through fraudulent or deceptive means. These crimes typically involve dishonesty, misrepresentation, or the abuse of financial systems for personal or corporate gain. — GPT
Generally, there seems to be a public consensus or call it understanding that “financial crimes” must relate to crimes carried out on financial systems. Like cooking those books in an investment bank, but is this really the case?
Personally, I like to say that most crimes are financial, especially within the Corporate world.
By this understanding, I've classified a varying range of crimes under “financial crimes” because the ultimate motivation is financial gains even though the process generally doesn't involve direct attacks or interactions with a financial system.
Playing by this view allows one to more effectively understand just how much crimes the Corporate world gets away with. And they get away with it because the legal system shields it but the big question is how?
In the corporate world, crime has been reduced to being just a cost of doing business. This is evident in how these activities do not attract intense persecutions but rather, some cheap fines to the corporations involved. Most of the time, these fines and settlements are much lower than the financial gains these corporations attain from their criminal operations.
This essentially makes the legal system a giant shield for Big Corps because if you knew you'd only pay a fine of $30 million for criminally attaining $170 million, what would you do?
You'd very much go ahead and commit those crimes. $120 million is money you won't have if you don't do the crime.
Welcome to the #1 business of the corporate world.
This is an industry of numerous million, billion and trillion dollar companies generating billions in revenue annually, and what the government wants most is to know where and when you spend your $69.
If we're going to be honest and judge by value, bringing transparency to corporations by integrating their businesses on blockchains would eliminate far more financial crimes than any KYC projects on individuals would.