Arthur Andersen

Arthur Andersen audited Enron, WorldCom, Waste Management and Sunbeam, and by the late 1990s its consulting arm earned more than its audit practice, which pushed partners to sell advisory work to the clients they were checking; that arm separated as Accenture in 2000 after arbitration. A 2002 federal obstruction conviction over shredded Enron documents ended the firm's ability to audit public companies, cost about 28,000 US jobs, and reduced the Big Five to the Big Four before the Supreme Court overturned the verdict in 2005. Readers get the incentive problem inside an audit partnership where the client pays the auditor, and the consequences of concentrating audit in four firms. Barbara Ley Toffler wrote from inside Andersen's consulting practice, and Gow and Kells cover the survivors and the structural conflicts they carried forward.

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