MICHAEL LEVI'S BOOK, Regulating Fraud: White Collar Crime and the Criminal Process, offers a detailed and useful analysis of the treatment accorded this "new breed" of criminals. Its scope, its theoretical and practical concerns and its wealth of comparative data provide fresh insights into white collar crime.

In short, Mr. Levi presents a qualified and sometimes involved explanation of the judicial process, primarily in Britain, but also in the United States and elsewhere, with observations on sociology, government and the professions. While gauging the impact of fraud on society and the business community seems at first glance simple, Levi points out that reporting systems on crime differ widely. Some well known statistical methods have yet to recognize white-collar crime as crime, and many cases, in both the United States and Britain, go unreported.

Despite these difficulties, according to Levi, losses from fraud "dwarf all other types of property crime" in purely financial terms. These costs, furthermore, have tripled in Britain since 1980 and quintupled since 1974 when the cost of fraud in London was estimated at £223 million. This does not include what the author calls "public sector corruption." The fraud reported thus far includes only "nonstate regulatory agencies," such as Lloyds of London, the Stock Exchange and the Securities and Investment Board (SIB) and this limited theater is further restricted by including only the level of crime that is disclosed. On the matter of unrecorded fraud, Levi writes: The larger the fraud, the greater the embarrassment, and in the absence of a clear insurance or compensation benefit from reporting, or legislative requirements or company policy to disclose ...there is no correspondence between fraud seriousness and reporting. In other words, in this area the roads are not well marked and the consequences of fraud by no means certain.

There have been numerous changes in the reporting of fraud and in the application of criminal sanctions against fraud in Great Britain and the United States. Prosecution of white-collar criminals is rising rapidly, particularly in the United States. Prior to 1987, no one went to prison in Britain for insider dealing. Levi also shows the "open-endedness in possible outcomes in high-status fraud cases." After reviewing three cases in Malaysia, the United States and Great Britain, one of which involved the sentencing of Paul Thayer, former Reagan administration deputy secretary of defense, Levi concludes that any of these cases could plausibly have ended in different sentences. In this comparison, Thayer's sentence of imprisonment for four years was viewed as harsher than the other sentences. Had the judge chosen to emphasize other considerations, the sentence could have been far more lenient, Levi concludes.

One of Levi's primary concerns is the issue of fairness and class bias. Ex-Reagan aide Michael Deaver's recent suspended sentence, which Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., called "a failure of justice," is one prominent example. Looking at prosecutions of social security fraud in Britain, Levi notes the harsh treatment meted out to small offenders, but concludes that it is not necessarily discrimination against the middle or lower classes. These people may be at a "disadvantage," he writes, in their ability to plead considerations such as responsibility for a company or for other employees which could "mitigate against a stiff punishment."

More ordinary people may carry, in Levi's view, the "image of people who contribute nothing to society." The questions raised by Levi deal with the nature of fraud and its relationship to the social and economic fabric. Once that interconnectedness has been recognized, Levi's personal reservations as well as society's ambivalence about white-collar crime can be better evaluated. For instance, Levi emphasizes the "central importance to the British economy of invisible earnings from the service sector"--and the dependence of economic growth policy upon it. In this light, "the repercussions of failure to think through criminal policy on fraud could be both economically and politically disastrous."

Brian Sedgemore, a radical critic, counters that the solution to white-collar crime lies not in institutional changes but in abolishing "the ideology of greed at the political level." The author dismisses this approach as failing to take into account the effect of changes in Britain's balance of payments, but a more extended discussion on this point would have been useful. Ambivalence toward white-collar crime appears, from Levi's perspective, as a kind of background context in which the issue of prosecution raises unhappy choices or risks among competing interests. "With respect to fraud, many individuals and groups have internal conflicts of interest which make it hard for them to decide what selfish line to take: the desire to protect public confidence in the legitimacy of the system is countered by the fear of damaging the volume of trade and of putting themselves and their colleagues at risk of being convicted of criminal offenses."

The final contradiction is that "crime--all crime--is interwoven with the fabric of non-criminal social organization" and therefore repressing it involves the possibility of harming important civil liberties. For this reason, among others, Levi concludes that "fraud is a growing economic and political problem," for which "simple repression is clearly inappropriate." Such logic may leave some U.S. readers cold. It certainly raises the suspicion that Levi is writing a primer for those currently holding economic and political power. A more generous interpretation would be that he is simply bringing together evidence from different sides and attempting to reach reasonable conclusions. What becomes apparent in reading this book is that white-collar crime on both sides of the ocean often seems to defy conventional wisdom and analysis and, perhaps, the kind of prosecutions and sentencing we expect with other types of crime.

An article in the Harvard Business Review devoted to the ethical choices facing corporate managers points out that ethical decisions may be made within a narrowing margin of profitability and increased pressure from senior management to show results. Thus, business often pushes the manager toward what he or she sees as the outer limit or range of acceptable action. Since the limits themselves are ill-defined and the prospects of being caught remote, the manager often juggles priorities to survive. The question becomes whether these factors dictate a distinction between a corporate manager's malfeasance and a bank teller's simple embezzlement. The political and administrative questions surrounding the prosecution of white-collar crime are well presented by Levi. In a time of scarce resources, with the prosecution of white-collar crime requiring much patience and hard work by trained investigators, Levi's book offers a challenge that deserves to be met.