Editor's Note: It Took Only One Bad Apple

What's become perfectly obvious now is that Arthur Levitt won the war for independence. And, that what some pundits once described as a meager concession on the part of industry was anything but.
By conceding to disclose all fees paid to their audit firms for nonaudit consulting work, publicly held firms allowed Levitt to tag them as ready for the picking when regulators came looking for bad apples. Levitt's simple wisdom was that you don't have to win the battle to win the war.
Essentially, the SEC's chief regulator knew that all that was required in addition to industry's "meager concession" was time — about nine months to be exact, or at least that was the span between Levitt's exit and the surfacing of Enron's twisted tentacles. And if Enron's creative accounting didn't succeed in rallying the champions of auditor independence, Levitt was no doubt all-confident that another bad apple could not be far behind.
So ends the era of Big Five consulting as we know it.
Of course, some might argue that the sale of Ernst & Young's consulting unit to Cap Gemini in 1999 was the beginning of the end, but E&Y's nuptials served more to expose what might be the biggest story inside the overall professional services sector — the boom in mergers and acquisitions. In this issue's Guru feature,