Legal/Business
- Who can be found guilty of business crime, and what is the key to establishing criminal liability? Using the Internet, research and post an example of a business crime committed in the last two years and any and all who were held criminally liable. Include your source for information in your answer.
When an agent of a company commits a criminal act while at work, they are responsible for each aspect of the crime, also, when they commit the crime on behalf of the company they work for, then the company is held accountable for the crime. Wendzel et al. (2019), the basic principles applied in the establishment of liability to crime include the mental state of a person, prohibited action and lack of legal justification. The elements must be proven by the government beyond a reasonable doubt to establish criminal liability. In 2018, Walmart Inc. was held criminally liable for boosting corporate profits by failing to pay their workers for overtime worked, pay wages promptly, provide required time for meal and rest breaks and give an accurate list of wage statements (Rosado, 2020).
- When it comes to crime and privacy protection in the workplace, do private employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy? What about public employees? Why or why not? What is the test for the tort of invasion of privacy? If management’s interest is to make sure its employees are productive, can management monitor computers, workstations, phones, et cetera? Why or why not?
According to a study by Feng et al. (2019), a public employee has a reasonable expectation of privacy, subject to operational realities of the workplace. Private employees, on the other hand, have no expectation of privacy. The test for the tort of invasion of privacy allows any aggrieved party to file a lawsuit against a person who unlawfully intrudes into their private life, obtains information, publicizes it falsely or uses their identity for personal gain.
Employers can generally monitor the activities of employees to see whether they are productive. As an employer, the ownership of the computer is theirs and hence has the right over the activities carried out on the computer. Secondly, they can track the time spent on the computer or idle time at the terminal. However, under certain circumstances, employees have rights of protection from electronic monitoring and also from the Fourth Amendment, which safeguards against unreasonable search and seizure.
References
Feng, Q., He, D., Zeadally, S., Khan, M. K., & Kumar, N. (2019). A survey on privacy protection in block chain system. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 126, 45-58.
Rosado Marzán, C. F. (2020). Wage Theft as Crime: An Institutional View. Available at SSRN.
Wendzel, B., Angelo, M., Jantz, M., & Peterson, A. (2019). Corporate Criminal Liability. Am. Crim. L. Rev., 56, 671.