(FORTUNE Magazine) – If you've watched TV news lately, you've probably seen a ceremonial live lottery drawing, which is almost inevitably monitored by a KPMG auditor. The careful scrutiny goes back to a 1980 incident known as the Pennsylvania 6-6-6 lottery fix, when the lottery host, an official, and stagehands rigged the balls. The conspirators eliminated eight of the ten numbers from the drawing by injecting the balls with paint, effectively weighing them down. Then they bet on all possible combinations of the two remaining, unweighted numbers. When 6-6-6 came up they won $1.2 million, but the number and their bets were so suspicious they got caught. The scheme inspired an upcoming movie called Numbers, directed by Nora Ephron and starring John Travolta and Friends' Lisa Kudrow.

After that incident, lottery officials watched drawings more carefully. They keep the balls in inviolable vessels, ranging from sealed suitcases to tinted bags, says KPMG's senior manager Rick Hannmann. "You don't want people to look through the bag so that they could try to manipulate the ball," he says. "If the coating has flaked off, we recommend that the ball set is taken out for the night." Officials also periodically weigh the individual balls. After a drawing, the auditor will run another to be sure the same numbers don't come up.

The auditors, often graduate accounting students and KPMG interns, rotate safeguarding the lottery. They go through a class and an apprenticeship before they are entrusted with lottery duties. If they excel at this job, they might move on to handle an even more glamorous accounting assignment: auditing the Oscar tallies.

--Carol Vinzant