I think that one of us is misunderstanding the point of ROWE. To quote from the referenced article:
"“In a Results-Only Work Environment, people can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done.” This is not simply company-sanctioned flextime. A true ROWE has unlimited paid vacation time, no schedules, no mandatory meetings, and no judgments from co-workers and bosses
about how employees spend their days. In other words, managers trust employees to get their work done and do not mandate — or even comment on —
when, where, or how it happens. Because everyone is evaluated based on what they accomplish, as opposed to how much time they spend looking busy at their
desks, it becomes clear very quickly who is actually getting work done and who isn’t.'
It's not about process or non-process, rules or no rules, standards or no standards. It's about the -manner- in which work gets done. It seems to me you could load as many performance/quality/compliance parameters as you liked into a ROWE-based work culture. You could have processes ... first you do the report, THEN you spell check it, THEN you attach the corporately-mandated coversheet .... even in a ROWE environment. It's not at all clear to me how having to go into an office 9-5 and sit in a cube (or worse, an open floorplan office) is going to help avoid law-breaking or prevent fraud or inhibit any other kind of serious badness that I can think of. I have to believe that the worst corporate offenses in modern times have all been birthed in office settings and probably in very regimented ones as well (banking scandals come to mind).
People ARE doing ROWE increasingly in the form of after-hours work, working from coffeeshops, that sort of thing. If the outputs, the "results", of these endeavors were not valuable and acceptable to their employers then I don't think that people would do this sort of work. If they heard, the morning after a late night working, "Hey cowboy, we can't use the Peterson sales report you put together, you didn't do it here in the office at your desk, how do we know the COO won't land in jail?" then that sort of work would not be happening at all.
You seem to speak of traditional management being about "we've got to watch and control the employees because they're at core a liability". To the extent that ROWE does/would succeed, I think it's because it shifts that mental paradigm to "employees basically want to do good work and contribute and are an asset" and ROWE is a great way to motivate and empower such employees. It requires not just a process shift, but an ideological shift.
To summarize, I don't see how a highly-managed, in-office work environment works to prevent the kinds of problems that you mention. At least not among what most would consider "white collar" employees. Virtually all corporate fraud and abuse to date has been hatched in non-ROWE workplaces. The traditional management approaches carry high costs, both in diminished productivity, and in the productivity-opportunity costs that might result from ROWE-style "empowerment" of employees. I too am a knowledge-worker, and like you I thrive on having autonomy and in being evaluated primarily by the results of my efforts. But I also think that the general approach could be much more widely-applied in the business world and that it's benefits would be immeasurable.