The financially illiterate middle class may encounter chartered acc­ountants around the dreaded season of tax returns—as the self-pitying definition goes, they are people we pay to tell us if we are broke and by how much. Auditors are higher up the angels’ hierarchy, known only to businesses. The Hollywood caricature is of a bald head crowned with a visor, shirt-sleeves rolled up, digging into dusty, oversized registers, poring over data, crunching numbers, reading complex financial gobbledygook—the things that make many shudder is routine, even exciting, for these certified practitioners of a modern black art.

But how and why does it matter to us…what these hifalutin professionals get up to in their day jobs? Especially in their role as ‘statutory auditors’—as defined by comp­any laws—for big, medium and small corporations? Because it does. Because, as stockmarket regulator SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) explained in the 2009 Satyam case, auditors have a “direct, fiduciary”...