The implosion at Indian IT specialists Satyam raises many questions about corporate governance. As Madhukar Angur says in the Deccan Herald , the debacle suggests we have learned very little since Enron and WorldCom. And that's despite governments around the world tightening their corporate governance regimes with laws like Sarbanes-Oxley.

But nothing will be fixed until the issue of auditor independence and integrity is addressed. As Angur points out, the company was able to inflate its profits by $1.6 billion and its auditors at PwC didn't pick up the problem.

Francine McKenna at The Auditors blog really gets stuck into the problem with these conflicts of interest. She points out that Satyam was a key strategic partner for PwC and that is worth examining. McKenna writes: "Did the strategic importance of Satyam as a systems integration partner and technical resource cause global PwC leadership to overlook, look the other way, or not take action on reports of poor quality or lack of independence by Price Waterhouse India partners and others? Did PwC leadership - US, global, and Indian- enable and perhaps promote complicity in the fraud called 'India's Enron' for the sake of their consulting business strategy? Did Satyam pay PwC for the privilege of being included in these deals by agreeing to exorbitant, higher than market audit fees as has been reported?"

As McKenna points out, the audit industry is rife with these conflicts. So the corporate governance problem will not be resolved until that's addressed. Sarbanes Oxley has not resolved the problem.

So how to resolve it then. Clusterstock has come up with its own radical solutions. These include nuking the Securities and Exchange Commission which has failed to protect investors, stop letting companies hire their own auditors, and finally make each listed company pay a fee to an independent auditing organization which then hires the auditors for member companies.

Over the top? This problem will not disappear and might need radical measures.