Remember when wrong-doing was, well...wrong? Back in the day, people used to feel bad when they did things that everyone else in society agreed were unethical, or just plain creepy. But that all ceased to exist the moment a Hollywood executive invented reality TV. These days, doing wrong no longer results in your immediate and eternal social ostracization, it results in your own television show on E! network.

No one fears getting caught anymore because society practically encourages it—do something vile enough and there's a NY Times best-selling book in your future. And if there's an upside to getting caught, why not try and get away with something illegal? Clearly everyone else is doing it, right? Take Bernie Madoff, for example. Sure, he may be banned from ever working on Wall Street again, but he's got a bright future as a pundit on CNBC when he gets out in 150 years.

Hey, America, I got off 147 years early for good behavior...watch my show "Madoff Money" on CNBC!

But none of Wall Street's recent scandalous and unethical behavior should be surprising or unexpected. It is, after all, mankind's nature to try and get away with as much as humanly possible (just ask Bill Gates). Who among us hasn't stolen office supplies when no one was looking, or shaved the neighbor's cat and blamed it on the kid across the street? That opportunism is a valuable survival instinct—hard-wired into each of us—I think Darwin called it the 'douche-bag' gene.

The real problem then, is that it's too easy to get away with stuff in the world of business and finance. Historically, we as a society, put into place certain laws and disincentives to dissuade people from engaging in undesirable activities such as embezzlement, insider trading and gay marriage. But laws only work after the fact, and only if you catch the culprit. Even then we have to house them at the taxpayer's expense. Surely, it's better and cheaper to discourage people from committing crimes in the first place. How? With shame.

shame (shaym) 1. A painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarrassment, unworthiness, or disgrace.

What? That acolyte was asking for it...

Shame is an incredibly powerful persuader. It can make disgraced business executives kill themselves ritualistically with a sword (but only the Japanese, seemingly). It can make homosexuals pretend to be straight. And it can make Catholics parishioners confess their misdeeds (just not Catholic Priests).

Yet shame only works if those on Wall Street think they'll get caught. And enforcement requires strict oversight. But not political oversight—politicians can easily be bought off (see Rod Blagojevich). No, the only way to make the threat of exposure effective is by making sure Wall Street never knows who might be watching or when.

Currently, corporations are legally required to disclose specific information to the general public, ostensibly so that investors can make intelligent decisions. Not surprisingly—whether through malice or mental incompetence—most financial institutions report the information differently, using different formats, essentially obfuscating the sort of issues the laws were originally intended to expose.

Hey, waitaminute...

Fortunately, there's a way to stop these shady shenanigans—it's called transparency. Long time readers can attest to my affection for open-standards. Proprietary formats such as .doc, .pdf, .wmv, and even .mp3 formats almost always require licensing (and frequently demand legal actions). Open standards, on the other hand, freely allow the easy interoperability and sharing of data—precisely the remedy suggested by Daniel Roth in an article from Wired Magazine.

Finance and investment firms would be required to generate reports online using a form of data 'tagging' called XBRL, for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. With a common format structure, all financial data could be sorted, sifted and crunched by any interested party, including me or you.

Instead of assigning oversight responsibility to a finite group of bureaucrats, we should enable every investor to act as a citizen-regulator. We should tap into the massive parallel processing power of people around the world by giving everyone the tools to track, analyze, and publicize financial machinations.

Or to put it more colorfully: Imagine trying to commit a crime (say, 'public urination') in the middle of a football field in front of 60,000+ fans. Yeah, that's just not going to happen. And that's why true financial oversight requires giving everyone a ticket to the Accounting Games. That way, no one on Wall Street will ever feel relaxed enough to think they can piss on the rest of us and get away with it.