I think you're on to something. Ratings on sites like Elance are broken. Clients feel compelled to give 5 star feedback to freelancers, sometimes just to get them off their back. This basically means that you can't look at a reputation score to tell you how good the freelancer actually is. I like the idea of a third-party anonymous person doing an audit. That person would need to have access to all the relevant files though, and have the right skills to judge the freelancer's work. Even the prospect of being audited could be a deterrent to the kind of behavior we saw in this case, which means that randomly auditing one out of every x gigs could be enough.