Audit, the imperative for accountability

In The Audit Trail: How the Audit Trail Heralded Financial Accountability and International Supreme Institution,

P Sesh Kumar turns what might seem like a dry subject-the history of auditing and public finance-into an intellectual odyssey across empires, religions, and revolutions.

Published by The Browser, the book is both a global history of accountability and a meditation on the moral architecture of the state. At its core, Kumar argues that audit is civilisation’s conscience — the mechanism by which power explains itself to the governed. Long before modern democracies and corporate regulators, rulers in India, China, and the Islamic world had already discovered that unchecked authority corrodes itself.

From Kautilya to Xi: A 2,000-Year Ledger of Accountability

The book opens with a charming yet profound moment — a question from the author’s granddaughter. P Sesh Kumar, who once served as Director General (Audit) in the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India, is asked by the curious child what exactly an auditor does. That innocent query becomes the spark for a sweeping intellectual journey-tracing the birth and evolution of auditing from the temple accountants of Sumer around 3000 BCE, who inscribed offerings on clay tablets in cuneiform script, to the bureaucratic aristocrats of ancient Egypt, who transformed record-keeping into an instrument of royal order and accountability.

From ancient civilisations, the author essays tales of the Middle Ages, with refinement in accountability in governance gaining foothold in the port city of Venice. Thereafter, the evolution of accounting codes and methods spread like wildfire through Europe, and the Industrial Revolution accompanying colonialism globalised the practices of Venice and London.

 But Kumar builds a vivid tale of governance accountability with a flashback to third-century BCE Pataliputra, where Kautilya (Chanakya) codified financial discipline in the Arthashastra. Kumar vividly reconstructs how the Mauryan state ran a complex system of collectors and treasurers who checked each other’s ledgers-an early model of separation of powers. The narrative then moves to the Gupta Empire, where inscriptions on copper plates served as both fiscal records and instruments of moral reminder-gifts, endowments, and penalties etched into metal to outlast corruption.

Kumar draws a line from these practices to the Censorate of imperial China and the Bayt al-Mal of early Islam, showing how oversight was not merely administrative but spiritual.  In perhaps the most captivating section, Kumar introduces Luca Pacioli, the Renaissance mathematician who published the principles of double-entry bookkeeping in 1494. His work, Kumar writes, “turned merchants into historians of their own integrity.” From Venice to the Dutch East India Company, accounting became both a language of trust and a tool of empire. But The Audit Trail is not nostalgia for ancient wisdom. Its later chapters examine how modern institutions-especially India’s Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG)-inherited this ancient burden of scrutiny, only to find themselves trapped in procedural ambiguity.

Kumar cites the 2024 Supreme Court ruling that limited the CAG’s authority as emblematic of a global trend: democracies that revere transparency in rhetoric but restrict it in practice. His lament for the CAG-”a caged lion, surrounded by walls it did not build” — may be the book’s most searing line. It captures both the institutional fragility of modern audits and the author’s belief that accountability, once lost, cannot easily be legislated back.

Kumar rekindles readers’ memories of a turbulent chapter in India’s recent history, offering insider insights from his years within the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). He revisits the period when India’s top audit institution dominated headlines, as media outlets seized on the staggering figures of presumptive losses cited in audit reports on the 2G spectrum allocations, coal block allocations, and the Commonwealth Games.

 

With a storyteller’s flair, Kumar recounts how CAG officials forged camaraderie under fire, standing together as the institution faced intense backlash from the Manmohan Singh-led Cabinet-a government unsettled by audit findings that reshaped the national conversation on accountability.

Style and Scholarship

Kumar writes with the poise of a historian and the precision of an auditor. His prose is dense but elegant, enriched with cross-civilisational parallels: Confucian duty beside Islamic justice, Venetian ledgers beside Mauryan palm leaves. The tone is erudite yet accessible, balancing narrative sweep with archival depth. If there is a shortcoming, it lies in the book’s ambition. The breadth of its canvas occasionally comes at the expense of detail-the reader might wish for more on postcolonial reforms or the rise of digital audit systems. But these are minor quibbles in a work that so successfully connects moral philosophy to fiscal policy.

Verdict

The Audit Trail is that rare work of nonfiction that combines historical insight with civic urgency. It reminds readers that transparency is not a bureaucratic virtue but a civilisational one-born in temples, refined in empires, and endangered in democracies. In tracing how the world learned to watch its own wealth, P. Sesh Kumar has written not just the history of accounting but the story of accountability itself.

The writer is a senior Delhi-based journalist