Even though missteps and outright mischief in the banking industry have attracted attention in recent years, federal prosecutions for fraud involving financial institutions have actually gone way down, The New York Times reports.
“During the first 11 months of the 2011 fiscal year, the federal government filed 1,251 new prosecutions for financial institution fraud,” Catherine Rampell writes on the Times’ Economix blog. If that pace continues, she notes, a total of 1,365 prosecutions for the fiscal year are projected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which analyzed Department of Justice records.
“That’s less than half the total a decade ago,” Rampell writes. Meanwhile, she notes, federal prosecutions for all crimes have nearly doubled in the past decade.
Rampell’s posting is accompanied by examples and an important caveat: the financial fraud category “can refer to crimes committed both within and against banks. Defendants include bank executives who mislead regulators, mortgage brokers who falsify loan documents, and consumers who write bad checks.”
In other words, the numbers don’t just depict bankers stuffing cash into bags and flying to countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the United States.
