Talk:Arthur Andersen/Archives/2013

SEC "right to practice" rule
Hi there, I do have a question, which rule/paragraph of the SEC is this article paragraph refering to: "Since the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission does not allow convicted felons to audit public companies, the firm agreed to surrender its CPA licenses and its right to practice before the SEC on August 31, 2002" ? Under which legal rule does the SEC not allow that and since when? Thanks! --132.180.228.3 (talk) 18:44, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Big 5
"Arthur Andersen realized, before the rest of the Big Five, that business consulting was a very lucrative business."

Big Five? Needs to explain who the Big Five are, I have no idea who the other four are.

I know I wrote this stub, but looking at it after a little while, I have to say it's rather Zenlike. --The Cunctator

Any info on founder Arthur Andersen? If so, could rename company article to "Arthur Andersen LLP" --Rj 21:05, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

Andersen.com
Hey, Andersen.com is not functional - it just has a dummy welcome page. Does the company still exist?

It is included on the List of notable business failures--anon

Yes, Arthur Andersen, LLP is still in business, never declared bankruptcy and operates the Q Center (a conference facility available for rental).

After Andersen, who's next?
Re the punishment handed out to Arthur Andersen - in this case for the audit of Enron.

Andersen was a victim of a culture that doesn’t support financial audit. This is a crucial matter for debate, as the IMF now hopes to overcome the resistance of local politics to financial stability globally.

As for the wasted money in the European Union, the director-general of Internal Audit there was warned: “We have ways of breaking people like you”.

Under some pressure last year, the UK government issued a consultation document to try to change the loose culture among public servants. This document, the draft Civil Service Bill, may come to nought; but significantly it is the first time in 150 years that such a legislative step to control public spending was thought necessary. Things must be bad.

There is little political will to protect financial audit that acts for taxpayers. Arthur Andersen became victims of this attitude - who's next? Incidentally, there's no international forum to address this abuse, in what is a global economy.

The largest of the Big 5 ?????????
If there is any truth in this, it almost certainly applies to the U.S. practice only. Calsicol 12:11, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
 * The Big 4 article says it was the smallest, which is more in line with what I thought, but I'll change it to just "one of" Calsicol 12:13, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, before sister company Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) severed ties with Andersen Worldwide, S.C. (AWO), the umbrella organization that contained the Arthur Andersen (AA) and Andersen Consulting (AC) entities.
 * Besides the separation of Andersen Consulting (Accenture), there is the fact that Andersen's rivals engaged in a series of huge mergers. In 1987, KMG and Peat Marwick formed KPMG. In 1989 Ernst & Whinney and Arthur Young formed Ernst & Young while Deloitte Haskins & Sells merged with Touche Ross to form Deloitte & Touche (later Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu). In 1998 Price Waterhouse merged with Coopers & Lybrand to form PricewaterhouseCoopers. Arthur Andersen was not part of such huge mergers, and gradually lost its position. I am pretty sure it was only the 5th audit firm worldwide right before Enron broke, but not sure about particular markets, such as the USA. 186.241.79.85 (talk) 21:22, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Athur Andersen?
Just wondering: why is is the title of this page 'Arthur Andersen' and doesn't it have the name the firm used for at least the last two years (or so) it exsisted: Andersen? The logo shown on the page is also the Andersen version.. Q300r bc2 07:01, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Andersen was never the legal name of the Firm; it had never changed from Arthur Andersen, LLP. Shortening it to just Andersen was a marketing decision.

how did arthur andersen get involved in this particular case? what did they do?

News?
I dont't see what's the use of this link to News Trove. It looks more like hidden advertising.

How Ironic...
If the text of the company history is to be believed, Arthur Anderson was founded on honesty, integrity and fair-dealing throughout it's 85-year history. How ironic that this firm's name is now regarded as synonymous with crooked accounting in Corporate America.Landroo 12:26, 24 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Not Ironic - its tragic. People think the AA connected with crooked accounting because they are uninformed.  For example, your comments indicate that you think AA was a company.  This is not true.  It was just a partnership of many independent small firms working under the same name.  A few individuals at one firm did some very bad stuff, then the good names of hundreds of innocent and unrelated people got dragged through the mud.  24.222.54.66 (talk) 18:11, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, the above is not quite true either. While the local partnerships operated with some autonomy, they were far more interconnected than a mere grouping of 'independent small firms working under the same name.' For instance, ALL complex decisions made by local managers were reviewed by the Professional Standards Group (PSG), which acted with significant central authority. In fact, the PSG objected to many of the Enron decisions made locally in Houston, but contrary to AA policy, local Houston managers not only refused to implement their decisions, they sometimes directly lied and stated the PSG agreed. And it was more than a 'few' people who did bad things. Enron, WorldCom, Sunbeam and Baptist were all managed by different groups. All acted unethically and illegally. So a good case can be made the AA encouraged a culture of shady accounting practices throughout the enterprise. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.65.192.1 (talk) 19:01, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm looking for ex coworkers who used to work at AA at the D.C. branch Faragut North. If anyone knows of the employee who goes by the Initials M.M.C please her I love her! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.85.238.204 (talk) 14:35, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Well its certainly understandable what happened to the organization. After the Enron scandal, if I were a stockholder of some company and saw that they had used Anderson to audit their books for the annual report, I would have zero trust in the audit, and would dump the stock as fast as I could. So essentially no traded company could dare to use Anderson as its auditor after that, even if they had regained their SEC approval. And it's not all that tragic, I'm sure most of the people quickly were absorbed into other companies, excepting maybe the top managers. --71.214.221.153 (talk) 03:28, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Presidents "pardon"
Whatever the right word should be in this sentence, the word chosen was clearly wrong. "despite receiving a pardon from the Supreme Court of the United States on behalf of the Enron case, Andersen received too much damage"

--Christofurio (talk) 15:50, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Andersen pensions lost due to arrogance of not ring-fencing the money
I seem to recall that the pension fund for Andersen employees got wiped out because they didn't ring-fence it. Does anybody know anything about this??? As I recall, it was never done because, whenever anybody suggested it, it immediately got shot down because it implied that Andersen might go under some day, and the arrogance of the firm prevented them from even implying that by ring-fencing their pension money, so it all got lost in the Enron fraud. Some help on this please? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.149.161.19 (talk) 17:52, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Culture
I also don't see any section/discussion of the firm's culture. I remember that the rest of the industry knew them as a firm filled with arrogance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.149.161.19 (talk) 17:53, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

This whole article
This is about the worst article as far as accuracy I have seen on Wiki. It first fails to more than mention Leonard Spacek who built the firm. It fails to mention early important clients other than Schlitz Brewing. It fails to mention the "One Firm Concept" which was the basis of the whole success and has numerous errors in its timeline. Altogether, it is very inacurate and I hopefully can rewrite the whole thing in the future. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BillFloyd (talk • contribs) 15:05, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Well I'm not sure I would go that far but it has a number of faults. Firstly it is entirely US centric "From a high of 28,000 employees in the US and 85,000 worldwide.....". You wouldn't know it from the article. It also suffers from the ex-Andersens people's habit of rewriting history but also from no-one wanting to be associated with it.

It would be good to bring out:

Worldwide operations Key alumni (with names - not just 2 of the last 3 etc etc) Firm culture (perceived as a monoculture "androids") One Firm Concept Who got what on the breakup (eg UK -> Deloitte, Germany -> E&Y etc etc) Crantock (talk) 22:54, 20 November 2012 (UTC)