For accountants 2001 was not a good year. After decades of quietly building up the widest-ranging professional services firms in the world, the big five – KPMG, Ernst & Young, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and, of course, Andersen – found their reputations under fire as the full implications of Andersen’s role in the collapse of Enron became clear.
The concept of the ‘independence’ of the constituent practice areas of the accountancy firms had long been problematic. All of the big five provided a range of services – auditing, tax advisory work, business consulting and expert witness services through to forensic accounting.
