A picture perfect company

Or so the banner says on Polaroid's press release web page. There's a tragic irony to the story, as a company founded on a great innovation lost its way and failed to invent itself a future. In this instance, there seems to be a nasty fraud coming out of the Petters venture capital group.

Of course, it pales into comparison with the Madoff debacle. Yet a common theme is emerging of relatively large organisations pursuing fraudulent activities without any of the supposed governance/audit controls being triggered.

A lesson from these recent failures is that the whole regulatory approach needs to change. Policymakers thought that Sarbanes-Oxley had solved the issues that were found in the Enron failure. Unfortunately all those reforms achieved was a huge fee windfall for consultants and auditors - fraud and governance failures seem to have continued more or less unchecked.