(Kirk 1984, 29, quoted by Zeff 2003, p. 267ff). As early as 1978, the Big Eight firms had gained entry to the top ten U.S. consulting firms by virtue of their gross billings for consulting services; indeed, by 1990, fees from consulting had reached 44 percent of total gross fees for Arthur Andersen/Andersen Consulting, a good twenty points higher than the percentage for the other Big Six firms. (Note: The Big Eight had contracted by merger, a factor that gives credence to claims that competition within the accounting industry exacerbated the questionable practices Sprouse identified in 1985. By 1998, the Big Six were the Big Five, after Price Waterhouse merged with Coopers & Lybrand to create PricewaterhouseCoopers.).

             The single change in accounting firm conduct contributing to the Enron/Arthur Andersen debacle might have been that change by the SEC from a confrontational posture toward the profession under Reagan/Bush Sr., although well into the 1990s, the SEC still balked at allowing audit firms to participate in "business relationships" with their audit clients, a stance that apparently was scrapped by the later 1990s, when a saturated marketplace for audit services forced firms to offer 'value added" services to clients to keep them: "during the 1990s the big firms expanded into global, multidisciplinary professional services firms that also happened to conduct audits" apparently with the SEC"s grudging consent, although SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt had expressed concern about it in 1996 (Zeff 2003, p. 267ff). .

             Remembering that the Big Eight had contracted to the Big Five by the Enron era, it would be well to note that other businesses were also in merger mode. Indeed, there was a worldwide merger boom that arguably cannot be ignored in piecing together the climate that fostered the Enron debacle. The 1990s merger boom was capped, in fact, with the merger in early 2000 of Time-Warner with America Online.