Arthur Andersen, every mention
33 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Arthur Andersen
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 22Ben Gilbert 9Packy McCormick 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Arthur Andersen comes up
Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired
- ▶ 40:55 David Rosenthal Like the, uh, Accenture to Arthur Anderson.
- ▶ 40:59 Ben Gilbert After many rebrands and iterations, some subset of Arthur Anderson was preserved as a tax organization that is now called Anderson Tax again.
- ▶ 41:32 Ben Gilbert Which is crazy to me that there was enough brand equity in Anderson left to sort of go back to Anderson.
Enron · Acquired
- ▶ 36:22 David Rosenthal And, uh, you know, everybody recommends the company's auditors at Arthur Anderson, you know, recommended the board.
- ▶ 55:31 David Rosenthal They don't really want those assets on the Enron books, and so they devise this scheme that they become acquainted with through Arthur Anderson, through the accountants and auditors, of using special purpose entities to package up these…
- ▶ 1:00:06 David Rosenthal They had to make the case to Arthur Anderson, to the auditors, that Anderson could get comfortable with them doing this.
- ▶ 1:00:11 David Rosenthal Anderson says like, I don't know, this is really out there, like very borderline that you guys could use mark to market accounting as an operating oil and gas company.
- ▶ 1:00:32 David Rosenthal So, Anderson takes it to the SEC.
- ▶ 1:01:24 Ben Gilbert Anderson tax was getting paid tons of fees.
- ▶ 1:01:44 David Rosenthal Here's probably also a good point to bring up the Arthur-Anderson conflict.
- ▶ 1:01:53 David Rosenthal At this point in time, pre-Sarbanes-Oxley and pre-the fall of Arthur-Anderson,
- ▶ 1:01:57 David Rosenthal All the accounting firms had attached consulting arms under the same roof, so Anderson had Anderson Consulting, which would go on to become Accenture after the demise of Anderson.
- ▶ 1:02:12 Ben Gilbert This whole thing took down Arthur Anderson, and what they did for the consulting arm was they rebranded it Accenture and spun it out into its own thing.
- ▶ 1:02:29 David Rosenthal Enron became Anderson's biggest client in the world.
- ▶ 1:02:49 David Rosenthal There were huge incentives for Anderson to let them get away with what they wanted to keep the client happy.
- ▶ 1:18:06 David Rosenthal So they, um, they go to Anderson, and they're like, well, what if we do this?
- ▶ 1:18:26 David Rosenthal And Anderson's like, uh, that seems really bad.
- ▶ 2:14:09 Ben Gilbert And speculating on how much they think Fastow might have pulled out of these entities and earned for himself at the expense of the company, Arthur Anderson starts getting real nervous about their role in enabling all of this, and then…
- ▶ 2:14:46 David Rosenthal So Arthur Anderson Legal on October 12th sends an email to the Houston office.
- ▶ 2:15:32 David Rosenthal So the Houston office of Arthur Anderson, they go on for weeks, like the volume of evidence destroyed here, tens of thousands of emails deleted.
- ▶ 2:16:13 Ben Gilbert And I think, you might know more than I do here, but I think Arthur Anderson went under not because they were found guilty of anything, but because when this all started playing out and they went in the news as being Enron's auditors,
- ▶ 2:16:35 Ben Gilbert Enron needed to do a handful of restatements that were just straight up Arthur Anderson's fault.
- ▶ 2:16:40 Ben Gilbert I think their customers all just left, and so Arthur Anderson basically ran out of business.
- ▶ 2:16:48 David Rosenthal So, Anderson itself, I don't believe ever faces any
- ▶ 2:17:08 David Rosenthal And as a result of that, the SEC in 2002, middle of 2002 revokes Anderson's CPA license.
- ▶ 2:17:21 David Rosenthal They had already started to lose tons of clients because, shocker, Anderson was also the auditor of WorldCom, which would be an even bigger bankruptcy that would happen shortly after Enron.
- ▶ 2:17:48 David Rosenthal So it was October 12th that Anderson starts shredding.
- ▶ 2:25:32 David Rosenthal Well, right at this time, Anderson, who's now fearing for its own skin, they're looking back through all this because everything's going on, and they're like, they discover about Copper and Dodson and like this crazy domestic partnership…
- ▶ 2:37:30 David Rosenthal We talked about how, uh, Arthur Anderson, uh, they're dead, they're over, and then the culmination, you know, politically and in terms of kind of the impact on the economy and the markets from all this is pretty shockingly quickly.
- ▶ 2:40:22 Ben Gilbert And that's the, like, Arthur Anderson can't destroy evidence thing.
- ▶ 2:52:41 David Rosenthal Either you would be hiring an old school accounting firm, not Arthur Anderson, but actually a great accounting firm, uh, ethical accounting firm, which will cost you a lot of money, or you would be spending half a million dollars plus to…
Not Boring (with Packy McCormick) - Extended Cut · Acquired
- ▶ 10:22 Packy McCormick So one of my dad's, my dad was a consultant, uh, at Arthur Anderson, uh, and luckily got out before Enron, thank God.
- ▶ 13:47 Packy McCormick Uh, so, you know, my, my dad, as I said, was a consultant at, at Arthur Anderson and literally