Is there a hint of too much emotion in our reactions to the Satyam saga? You bet. We are like that only.

That is why you find heated calls for reform, and a near unanimous conclusion that our system is somehow flawed. It would be good to remember that Ramalinga Raju and Satyam have not only fooled Indian authorities but also American authorities because the company’s stock is also traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Clearly, nobody found anything wrong in the financial reports the company filed with the NYSE, conforming to the US GAAP.

The other day, Infosys chief N R Narayana Murthy came on TV and expressed the view that, probably, the lax enforcement of the laws, rather than the laws may be to blame. You must remember that since the downfall of Enron, WorldCom and Tyco – all in the early 2000s – in the US, tougher corporate governance standards, exemplified by the Sarbanes-Oxley, have come into force. So it must be presumed that Satyam hoodwinked the authorities while still meeting these tougher standards.

Satyam likely did not exploit any major loophole in the law. It simply perpetrated the fraud by forming a rogue team led by Raju. Whether or not that included internal and/or external auditors would be an obvious question that remains to be answered.

Many experts have expressed the view that a team of professional, and independent, auditors could never have missed such widespread fraud spread over several years. DSP Merrill Lynch, which had been hired as a consultant to help Satyam find a buyer, uncovered it in a matter of days before terminating the agreement on Jan. 6, leading to Raju’s confession and complete turmoil. The obvious conclusion, as articulated by India Infoline’s Nirmal Jain on CNBC, is that some auditors colluded with Satyam executives to perpetrate the fraud.

Now, I am not sure you can stop that kind of thing with any law, perhaps with lynching. You can only stop these with due processes, which apparently failed in the case of Satyam. What these processes were and who is to blame will emerge sooner than later because PriceWaterhouseCoopers needs to protect its name and its future, if it needs to avoid the kind of fate that befell Arthur Andersen, the auditors of Enron.