Arthur Andersen LLP was an American accounting firm based in Chicago that provided auditing, tax advising, consulting and other professional services to large corporations.

By 2001, it had become one of the world's largest multinational corporations and was one of the "Big Five" accounting firms (along with Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers).

Born on May 30, 1885, in Plano, Illinois, and orphaned at the age of 16, Arthur E. Andersen began working as a mail boy by day and attended school at night, eventually being hired as the assistant to the comptroller of Allis-Chalmers in Chicago.

In 1908, after attending courses at night while working full-time, he graduated from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University with a bachelor's degree in business.

This gave rise to the uniform look of all the so-called "Arthur Androids", as employees referred to themselves, the intent being to provide the same service the same way to all customers in all locations.

[5] Arthur Andersen & Co. struggled to balance the need to maintain its faithfulness to accounting standards with its clients' desire to maximize profits, particularly in the era of quarterly earnings reports.

The firm has been alleged to have been involved in the fraudulent accounting and auditing of Sunbeam Products, Waste Management, Asia Pulp & Paper,[6] the Baptist Foundation of Arizona, WorldCom, as well as Enron, among others.

[7][8] The consulting wing of the firm became increasingly important during the 1970s and 1980s, growing at a much faster rate than the more established accounting, auditing, and tax practice.

Industry analysts and business school professors alike viewed the event as a complete victory for Andersen Consulting.

[16] Following the 2001 scandal in which energy giant Enron was found to have fraudulently reported $100 billion in revenue through institutional and systematic accounting fraud, Andersen's performance and alleged complicity as an auditor came under intense scrutiny.

Nancy Temple (in the firm's legal department) and David Duncan (lead partner for the Enron account) were cited as the responsible managers in the scandal because they ordered subordinates to shred relevant documents.

[23] The indictment also put a spotlight on the firm's faulty audits of other companies, most notably Waste Management, Sunbeam Products, the Baptist Foundation of Arizona and WorldCom.

The court found that the instructions were worded in such a way that Andersen could have been convicted without any proof that the firm knew it had broken the law or that there had been a link to any official proceeding that prohibited the destruction of documents.

Echoing this, United States Chamber of Commerce vice president Stephen Bokat pronounced Andersen "dead," and said that "there is no putting the company back together.