With the recent economic and financial crisis and other excesses working as catalysts, corporate governance, regulation and internal control have become inescapable topics in our present day society. Despite the introduction of new rules and the strengthening of the existing control bodies, new events could shake the global economy and call into question the effectiveness of the current control mechanisms. Between the obsession with formal control, which systematically leads to more regulation, and the search for other control systems, which would enable one to master the informal mechanisms, we have completed our analysis in this article with a review of the possible interactions between informal and formal control.