What I find revolting are the wails and lamentations of the business community about how Andersen should have been allowed to survive because businesses need auditors to produce statements to reassure investors. The WSJ has been publishing editorials for weeks about it, and they're dead wrong.
IMHO the government did the very right thing -- it's a lesson to the accounting companies that if they lie, then try to hide, they will be destroyed. Perhaps the others will wise up and behave at least slightly more honestly.
When the whole Enron mess started, I was ranting that Andersen was the most dishonest bunch of bastards I'd ever worked around (on software projects). Their goal was invariably to suck every cent they could out of the client company and deliver shoddy, useless software for which the client company would have to retain Andersen forever to maintain it. They would deliberately under-specify development hardware requirements, so that their workers would be wasting hours every day waiting for the computers to compile their programs; and they would swap people in and out of projects to train absolute beginners and move experienced people to other projects.
Watching them "work" was sickening.
To me, the only sad thing about the whole mess is that their IT consulting division got spun off into a separate company several years ago, and so it survived on its own. A damn shame.