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The mid-level Volkswagen executive who allegedly helped cover up the German automaker’s emissions fraud got nabbed by federal agents this week. But the FBI’s arrest of Oliver Schmidt underscores an uncomfortable truth about white-collar prosecutions nowadays: There are fewer of them, and big shots rarely get put in the pokey.
Over the past 10 years through 2016, federal prosecutions of white-collar crimes have dropped 21 percent, to 9,532 last year, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, which researches federal law enforcement. Many of them were garden-variety offenses such as credit card fraud, not misdeeds of large entities like Volkswagen or huge financial firms.
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