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Scaled crime is a result of a business process and it’s a very useful lens to understand how that business functions for the purpose of interdicting it. https://t.co/V6kjpNEzXd
This often causes problems for Seeing like a State reasons. The state does not perceive crime to be an output of a business. It can, with immense effort, describe it in that fashion, but it will default to understanding it in concepts it understands like perpetrators/cases/etc.
Which is not intrinsically a *wrong* thing, but it impedes one’s ability to understand what is going on and combat it. Sometimes, it causes important people to straight up deny reality of what is going on, because they’re (ahem) bad at business.
When explaining that to people for whom it is professionally relevant, I would often say “Remember, the adversary has a boss, a budget, performance monitoring, a supplier ecosystem, continuing education, an HR department, etc.” People often believe I’m kidding.
“Example please.” For many forms of fraud, the adversary needs to create or assume identities. This activity of their business requires some combination of labor, savvy, and purchasing things from specialists. All that costs money.
Many successful mitigations focus on forcing adversary to “burn” those identities at a higher rate to extract value, to raise the cost of synthetic identities, to disqualify from being effective generic forms of cheap labor and force the adversary to employ expensive pros, etc.
For more on this topic, more on financial crime than on stolen bikes, see my previous writing. Example: https://t.co/xukUl1xYvd
You might tell a fib on your taxes. Please don’t. But the amount of damage you can do is bounded. A startup specializing in a repeatable method to file fraudulent taxes at scale, perhaps using spurious tax positions or a supply chain to manufacture fraudulent documents, OTOH…
One thing the IRS did was starting to assign tax preparers numbers. The biggest single consequence of this is it allows you to cluster tax fraud, which the IRS institutionally perceived as being acts of individual taxpayers, by their preparer.
For more on that topic, a magic search word on irs dot gov is “abusive tax structures.” If you spend a few hours of reading about those because you have weird hobbies, you will find that IRS perceives many as being produced industrially by specialists with R&D/marketing/etc depts
Part of the reason for licensing regimes, btw, isn’t that the licensing teaches you anything or that it makes you more effective or that it makes you more ethical or that it successfully identifies protocriminals before they get the magic piece of paper.
It’s that you have to put a $X00k piece of paper at risk as the price of admission to the chance of doing the crime. This deters entry and raises the costs of criminal enterprises hiring licensed professionals versus capable, ambitious, intelligent non-licensed criminals.
A knock-on consequence of this is that, and I am stealing this directly from Dan Davies’ Lying for Money, if you have an accountant willing to go to prison and your crime doesn’t make you filthy rich then you are really, really bad at your job. Crime might not be for you.
Seen in this light, licensing regimes hear the critics of licensing regimes that suggest they are exclusionary, cost a lot of money, and teach nothing of value, and say “… And?” The usually don’t say this out loud.