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Too much has been written and told on this issue and the risk is that of falling into moralism and rhetoric.
We can consider this issue as a question of "private sins and public virtues" and I don't want to treat this topic from a religious point of view simply because I think it's not necessary. Honesty is a fundamental value also for whom is not a believer or believes in God but is not a practicing, like me.

In the theory, we all agree and claim it openly to the others; we must be honest and we are honest. It's OK. In the reality, instead, some people like better to tell lies, to deceive, to steal, to corrupt or be corrupted and to profit illegally of what belongs to the whole community.
They act like this for cynicism and lack of scruples with the justification that gain and success must be reached at any cost, in this society and with an additional discharge of responsibility given by the sentence: "everybody does it; why I shouldn't?" or "all thieves, nobody is a thief", otherwise..."You're a loser"! They try to make us believe they are obliged to fit to this dirty society but, in the reality, they made the society dirty themselves, with their daily dishonesty. As an ancient proverb of Naples says: "fish starts stinking from its head".

Money is the most powerful motivation to be dishonest and power derives from how much we have gained until our impunity lasts.
For money and for what money allows to get, many people is able to make the worst things, even robbing and killing their own parents or sons, but a society or community where greed and the consequent dishonesty are the rule becomes really a hell, a sewer full of human worms eating one another. In a reality like this, nobody has real friends or can trust on somebody and suspect and diffidence are the rule. Just honest persons are the weakest and vulnerable in a situation like this, although they're always the majority; in fact, dishonest people around them seem to multiply their presence because they frequently use violence and blackmail, the systems that a really honest person rejects and is neither able to use.

For this reason, given that the same basic moral code exist in all the Countries of the world, it would be nearly always possible to discover and fight illegality, although, in many Countries, this is tolerated at various levels, under an apparent cover of formal legality and social respectability.
I think that only when we risk to be killed and there's no escape (like under a dictatorial regime)

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