Yes, I forgot to mention this in my comment as well. That’s the irony of it - they were arguably highly responsible for the turmoil that led to increased regulation via SOX, and now they make much of their revenue on SOX compliance.
> they were arguably highly responsible for the turmoil that led to increased regulation via SOX, and now they make much of their revenue on SOX compliance.
No. Andersen Consulting started as a division within Arthur Andersen in the 1950s, but became a separate BU in 1989 and in effect a separate company by the late 90s. The split came about because AC's business (technology & business consulting) made much more money than AA's business (auditing).
The Enron debacle took down AA in late 2001 because AA was Enron's auditor. AC (actually Accenture by that point) wasn't involved.
There seems to be a lot of misinformation here in the comments. Accenture makes a lot if not most of its revenue from SOX consulting. After Enron, Congress passed a law (Sarbanes-Oxley or "SOX") that required public companies to certify their "internal controls" over the processes used to create the financial statements. Essentially, the volume of daily transactions for accounting became un-auditable and the focus shifted to understanding how business processes, systems, and data interact to arrive at numbers that go into the financial statements.
As a result, auditors have to have comfort over those processes and systems to sign their audit opinion. Most of the work Accenture does is creating flowcharts and diagrams on behalf of management that will help auditors understand those processes and systems... It saves time from auditors asking the same questions year after year and gives them a document to reference as audit support.
The process of adopting SOX is extremely painful for newly public companies because it requires creation of robust documentation, as well as eliminating opportunities for data to be changed by creating business rules in systems that are used as part of business processes (for example, requiring multiple levels of approval for certain kinds of things). Companies are often willing to pay in range of $1M to $5M for varying levels of help with this process.
Afterward Accenture often try to stick around and sell sexier things, like process improvement (since theoretically they know all the processes from their initial scope they have an easier time identifying opportunities for improvement) or more ambitious things like blockchain/AI solutions, as some people have pointed out in this thread.
