Peter Yeager Wins Federal Grant to Establish Nation’s First Data System for White Collar Offenses
With his colleague Sally Simpson at the University of Maryland, Yeager has obtained funding from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), U.S. Department of Justice, to help BJS design and implement the country’s first ongoing data collection system for violations of federal laws by individuals and organizations in business and the professions. The two-year project will involve developing a classification system for white collar offenses, a framework of the stages of enforcement employed in pursuing them, and tools for consolidating federal agencies’ diverse accounting systems into standardized statistical files for use in research and public policy work. Yeager began his work on this prospect with a grant from the American Sociological Association’s Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline with which he interviewed legal and information technology officials at several federal agencies and collected information on their data management systems.