This has been a banner season for punishing white-collar crime. Guilty pleas by Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former longtime personal lawyer, and criminal convictions and additional guilty pleas in the case of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort have drawn enormous attention.

Cohen admitted to bank fraud, tax evasion and campaign finance violations. Manafort, after having been convicted of tax fraud, bank fraud and failure to file a report documenting foreign bank and financial accounts, pleaded guilty to additional federal charges. It’s fair to assume, however, that neither man’s crimes would have come to light without the scrutiny drawn by their association with Trump. How many ordinary white-collar criminals expect to be found out?

The U.S. has never done an especially convincing job of policing and prosecuting white-collar crime. Complaints about the paucity of criminal prosecutions go back decades. The recent story of tax schemes engineered over many years by Trump’s family is an extreme instance of troubling and long-established pattern, showing little fear of legal consequences.

Since the financial crisis, the lack of criminal prosecutions has been widely deplored. Yet white-collar prosecutions are still on course to fall to their lowest level in at least 20 years, down more than 40 percent from 1998.

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All of which is true, no doubt — but justice still demands that serious crimes earn serious punishments.

That would require more resources. According to Don Fort, the chief of IRS criminal enforcement, the agency has the same number of special agents — about 2,200 — as it did 50 years ago, despite huge increases in the number of tax filers and the complexity of financial crimes. The Department of Justice would have to attract and retain ambitious, competent prosecutors. Government agencies would need better ways, including financial incentives, to entice whistle-blowers.

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This needs to change. White-collar crime is a menace, and the impunity of its ordinary perpetrators is intolerable. 

I, and a lot of other people, have been saying this for years, but it’s now beaten its way into the heads of the Bloomberg editors, which is rather a surprise.