This is even more fallacious- the only thing that unsourced opinion proves is that certain types of criminal conspiracies that are uncovered are deemed sensational enough to sell news services. It says nothing about the commonality of successfully covert conspiracies nor about the frequency of uncovered ones that are hard for the general public to understand/care about.
Oh what else can I think of off the top of my head? Uhhh...
That's all I can think of for right now. I mean we can hit the history books or case law to get a solid count I suppose, but to be frank, once a company hits a certain revenue point, it is pretty much guaranteed they've had to do something to get dirty/avoid getting outed as dirty.
So it really isn't that unusual. Throw in stuff that happened back before the rise of the Unions of the last century, and since their decline, and you also end up with so.e decent stories of workforce abuse. Though admittedly there's slant depending on who is telling it.
I know of a case of fraud in oil well lease payouts, someone was stealing a small from a large number of leases and had been doing so for years.
A company auditor caught it. Did they go to the police? No. They paid the guy to leave the company and never talk about it again. The guy might have stolen hundreds of thousands in the process, but the company knew they'd lose millions, just from clients demanding audits going decades back. It was easier and cheaper to cover up and never mention again.
Much like typical crimes, only a subsection of company malpractice comes into public view. There's a few major scandals per year from the largest and most publicly known companies.
The very least we can say is that company malpractice is more common than it appears, unless 100% of it is reported on.
You misunderstand. That is just what I keep in my head and have been accurately tracking and commiting to remembering in the last 5 or so years.
As has been mentioned as well is that governmental/regulatory apparata are typically starved of funding, so must limit their investigation/scrutiny to likely the most obvious cases.
Furthermore, if you've just entered into white collar circles these last few years, you may have been surprised at a tendency to not write things down. This isn't just people not realizing it is a good idea to do so, but a conscious decision in many cases due to eDiscovery, and the effects it has on provability in a court of law.
Pay attention on HN, and you'll get little snippets of other cases of "tribal skeletons" every now and again.
Anyway, by all means, I'm not necessarily arguing against your point; merely stating that given the sample size, and keeping in mind that regulators/the media can only dig up so much muck given limited manpower; it is not prudent to assume there isn't wrongdoing where no one has looked yet. I used to hold the same view you espouse; then I started A)cataloging things and B) noticed how often settlements seem to be applied with no admission of wrong doing.
Absence of evidence does not imply evidence of the non-existence thereof. You just haven't found it yet.
Can't believe I forgot about Wells Fargo, btw. That whole mess.
Mind that that's only the ones. I assume CFPB and other commissions have similar, but do keep in mind they can't be everywhere or investigate everyone. So without stats on how many actions are dropped by prosecutorial/investigator's discretion, it is actually difficult to make really solid claims as to the actual frequency of malfeasance. Further, from my social circle's anecdata, it seems to be a safe bet that just about every organization at least has something in the the way of "muck they've cleaned up after" without getting authorities involved.
Actually, they are quite uncommon, which is why they make headlines when discovered.
I'm not taking a side here, just pointing out a fallacy.