Peculiarities of detecting criminal offences in the sphere of economic activityACTIVITY

Abstract

The article establishes that the latent character of unlawful acts in the sphere of economic activity necessitates active searching for primary information, which conditions both the detection process and the methodology for verifying operational intelligence. For each serious and particularly serious criminal offence (or group thereof) in the sphere of economic activity, it is necessary to identify discrete structural elements that make it possible to construct an abstract model of the criminal unlawful act a model containing orienting information indicating that the detected objects are related to a criminal offence, i.e., a formal correspondence is established between the information obtained and the abstract model of the unlawful act formed in the mind of the detecting subject. Accordingly, the following search elements are characteristic of each category of criminal offences in the sphere of economic activity: the sphere of economic activity (commercial, non-commercial, banking, financial, etc.); objects (economic entities; fictitious enterprises; registration and licensing authorities; sites of illegal production; supervisory and audit bodies; persons preparing, committing, or having committed an offence, witnesses, agents); items (agreements; cash funds; tax returns; tax reporting documents and others; bank cards and accounts; accounting records; consignment notes; orders; invoices; delivery notes; payment orders; stamps and seals; facsimile signatures; passports, etc.); documents (the list of which and the search indicators they contain are contextualised according to the stage of economic activity); subjects (operative officer, investigator, detective, etc.); sources of operational intelligence and tactical methods of obtaining it. The process of gathering primary materials requires information on specific financial transactions (cash flow in the settlement account, cash flow in correspondent accounts of non-resident banks). Fulfilling the tasks in this direction consists in the comprehensive use of the capacities of supervisory and law-enforcement authorities regarding the circumstances of acquiring criminally derived income and the mechanism of its subsequent legalisation, including: gathering of primary materials by the pre-trial investigation body (interviews; requests for business accounting documents; submission of queries; use of automated information retrieval systems; use of covert intelligence data; obtaining information constituting banking secrecy); ordering documentary examinations of the activities of business entities (documentary audits and inspections). The developed algorithms of action are indicative for ascertaining the circumstances to be established during the investigation of criminal offences in the sphere of economic activity and are subject to individual adjustment taking into account the circumstances of the criminal proceedings and the investigative situation that has arisen.