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by mostlystatic 2182 days ago
I initially understood this to mean Accenture changed its name as a consequence of the Enron/Arthur Anderson scandal. But Anderson Consulting changed its name to Accenture in January 2001, and the scandal only became public later that year.

Seems like the two companies weren't very close even before that, the name change was required as part of a legal settlement with Arthur Anderson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture#Split_from_Arthur_An...

2 comments

That split was always pretty interesting to me. It seemed Andersen Consulting bristled at being attached to Arthur Andersen, mostly because Andersen Consulting had to pay 15% of their profits to Arthur Andersen. I figured that the limited partnership nature of consulting/accounting businesses meant that even individual divisions maybe felt their business was their business. The breakup started in 1997, but yeah it was ironic that they had agreed to jettison the name right before Arthur collapsed.
Pretty sure that the partners in Anderson took a big haircut after Enron.