화이트칼라 범죄의 심각성 및 양형기준 개선방안에 관한 연구: 횡령·배임을 중심으로

The objective of this article is to measure the seriousness of white-collar crime and the national perception on the sentencing, and to explore the problems in the sentencing guideline if the sentencing is insufficient compared to the severity of the crime along with how to improve it. This study examined the general discussion of the seriousness of the crime prior to the full scale debate on the magnitude of the white-collar crime. In the case of foreign countries, there has long been the awareness of the crime of the interest in the social consensus and thereby the cases are plentiful, on the other hand, in our country there is not much concern on this theme, and therefore it is hard to find the records of the research except research by a few scholars. In addition, there are only a few attempts to seek out improvement in the sentencing guideline by logically relating the severity of the crime with the sentencing guideline On the one hand, in regard to one of the most serious white-collar crimes which emerge in contemporary society, in particular, embezzlement/breach of trust crime, it is remarkable that court tended to punish it more generously compared to, so called, street crimes. Of course, this tendency has considerably relaxed since the enforcement of sentencing guideline in 2009, however, most Koreans have the perception that the sentencing is insufficient, compared to the magnitude of the white-collar crime. The issue of sentencing of white-collar crime stems from the imbalance of the sentencing criteria and the extremely poor law enforcement, and in order to address these problems, it is necessary to arrange it upward within the reasonable scope and to develop actively aggravating sentencing factors along with benchmarking of foreign cases and including them in the actual sentencing guideline. Since the research on the exploration on the sentencing factors is none other than wasteland in South Korea, the active research on this is expected.