I worked for AA in the 80's...let me tell you, if you wanted to ease your tax burden, these were the people to call.
If you wanted to reduce your tax bill you spoke with the experts in the Tax Practice at Andersen, not with anyone from Andersen Consulting. Andersen Consulting was involved in designing and implementing managment information systems. Their contracts with clients would be multi-yer, multi-million dollar projects. Andersen Consulting was very good at selling their services, and their success was an instrumental factor in the culture shift that led to the collapse of Arthur Andersen, the accounting company.
In the early 1990's Andersen Consulting started to earn more income than Arthur Andersen's accounting business, but the accountants had a larger number of partners and were distributed a greater share of the combined earnings. The consulting partners began to argue for a larger share of the combined earnings and for greater say in the management of the firm. This put pressure on the audit and tax partners to increase revenue. Delivering quality audit and tax services were no longer enough if you wanted to advance professionally in the audit and tax practices. You had to sell additional services to your clients, and the types of services you were expected to sell tended to compromise Andersen's independence as auditors.
In 1998 the differences between the accountants and the consultants could not be resolved, and Andersen Consulting paid Arthur Andersen about $1 billion to become independent and it gave up the rights to use the name Andersen Consulting, hence it became Accenture. Meanwhile Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm, had compromised its standards, and it was only a matter of time before an Enron type scandal rose and sunk the firm.
This is an oversimplification of events, but it covers the high points, or rather the low points. The saddest part is if the accountants and consultants could have resolved a few of their differences they could have spun off Andersen Consulting in a multi-billion dollar IPO that would have made all partners substantially more than they earned from the break up.