There would have been a clearout of implicated personnel, big fines and damages would have been paid, and with the help of Paul Volker's "holy water", the firm might eventually have rebuilt the public trust necessary to carry on.However, the document shredding has added a deeply disturbing, criminal dimension to the whole affair and, ever since it came to light, both clients and top employees, the firm's two most important assets, have been voting with their feet.Yesterday Andersen was suspended from all US government related work. Any number of US audit clients have already jumped ship and it can surely only be a matter of time before one or more of the UK firm's five FTSE 100 audit clients follows suit. The way things are going, Andersen will soon lack the global reach to service them. It's a meltdown, and however strong the relationship has been in the past, chief executives must in the end put the interests of their shareholders and bankers before personal loyalties.Small wonder that both the Italian and Spanish partnerships yesterday announced plans to break away from the Andersen Worldwide mothership. Enron is threatening to drag them down too, even though they had nothing to do with it whatsoever.The root causes of Andersen's downfall are hard to identify. Greed, insufficient outside regulation, undue reliance on non-audit fees, being too close to the client, lax accounting standards and poor application of those standards, little in the way of checks and balances – all these things no doubt played a part.But there also has to be something fundamentally rotten in any audit practice that allows itself to become part of an accounting deception, whether the process is conscious or not.

That highly paid, key personnel should then disobey both head office and government edict and destroy the evidence points to an almost total collapse in professional and ethical standards at the firm.How could that have happened? This is perhaps one best left for the corporate history writers to explore, but one observation is worth making. The top brass at Andersen seem to have spent most of the last five years waging war against the firm's troublesome offshoot, Andersen Consulting, now renamed Accenture. The consulting arm's attempt to break free from the founding partnership became an all consuming obsession for Andersen. Senior partners and management seemed to spend more time fighting Andersen Consulting than they did running their audit practice, and when finally it became obvious they had lost the war, they wasted their days and nights disputing the terms of the divorce and going hell for leather to set up a new IT consulting arm to compete with the first one.It is one of those ironies of history that Andersen's obsession with ensuring that Andersen Consulting be stripped of rights to the Andersen name was the best thing that could have happened to the now re-christened Accenture. If it hadn't already been forced to abandon the name, it would by now be doing so.The underlying reasons for the divorce are instructive too. At a quite early stage the consulting arm came to realise that there was a fundamental conflict of interest between what it did and what the audit practice was supposed to be doing.

It was plainly wrong to use the audit as a way of winning business for the consultancy, since this would compromise the independence of the audit. What's more, the consulting became a great deal more profitable and therefore valuable than the auditing. The tail came to wag the dog.The divorce proceedings were long, acrimonious and, for Andersen at least, all consuming. The loss of such a big chunk of the firm may have given what was left behind a certain unscrupulous edge, and a no-holds barred determination to rebuild Andersen into the integrated professional services company it was before the consulting arm began to break free.It takes a lifetime to build a reputation, five minutes to destroy it. Professional practices as big, respected and well known as Andersen were thought to be above such mortal truisms. We now know they are not.j.warner independent.co.uk. For all we know, his full name could be Alistair Graham, one of the prosperous Scottish brewing dynasty.

Or Alhambra Gomez, one of the proliferating tribe of Spanish merchants. Or Al-Raj Gupta, from the vastly wealthy Indian banking family. Or he might be Alilat Gheber from Cairo, named after the beautiful Arab word for "nature". Or he could be any number of other Ali Gs from all over the world, growing up in the melting-pot of south-east England.