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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

Enron didn't kill Arthur Anderson. Nothing is going to kill McKinsey. They're too intertwined with powerful people.

This is fundamentally different. Arthur Anderson was an auditing firm and did accounting. Their selling point was to be the "source of truth" for their client's books. What's that confidence is lost, then no one would hire them for their work. McKinsey, as a management consultancy, doesn't have to be a "source of truth" and offers perspective, which can be neither right or wrong. Management makes decisions on if they want to take McKinsey's advice or not.

What? Enron DID kill Arthur Anderson. They completely collapsed in mid 2002, right after Enron. They were also big players in the WorldCom collapse, so that contributed as well.

The corporate entity collapsed, but the consulting business continued at Accenture (and notably BearingPoint, among others), and substantial portions of the accounting business survives to this day as Andersen Tax and a few spinoff firms founded by ex-partners.

The only reason we haven't "another Enron" is because of Sarbanes-Oxley, not because Arthur Andersen was sufficiently destroyed.

Your chronology is incorrect.

- Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting split in 1989. It was an acrimonious divorce, with a long arbitration settlement finally concluding on 1 Jan 2000.

- That settlement gave AA exclusive use of the Andersen name. So Andersen Consulting changed its name to Accenture on 1 Jan 2000.

- Enron collapsed in 2001 and Arthur Andersen went out of business in 2002.

So it's not accurate to say that AA's consulting business continued at Accenture; the split happened a decade earlier.

Nah, they are now Accenture

Nope, Accenture split from Arthur Andersen 13 years earlier, in 1989.

See my other comment.

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