Rating: 
Summary: fairly good, but big gaps
Review: This is the memoire of Toffler, who made a lateral move into Arthur Andersen as the firm had begun to fall apart. She chronicles the company's history of high standards and then analyses how these values were gradually traduced by greedy partners, who wished to transcend their status as "mere accountants" and enter the big leagues of consultants. Essentially, to gain extremely lucrative contracts with such then-giants as Enron, AA lowered what were supposed to be independent auditing standards - this is the most basic conflict of interest and eventually it led to the collapse of Enron and then AA under criminal indictment.
That is it. You can tell that in about 20 pages, at most. So to fill up the rest of the book, we are offered extremely dull anecdotes by Toffler, who is variously shocked, disgusted, and sometimes coopted in a corrupted culture of sleazy money-grubbers. While she is too honest to be called selfserving in this book, she is not interesting enough to merit 240 pages. OK, it is a bit interesting to learn what they do in those accounting/consulting groups, but again it does not merit an entire book in my opinion. Nonetheless, her co-author, Reingold, is a good clear writer.
That being said, now that I have read a good many sources on this book, there are gaps that must be filled elsewhere. The authors completely missed the structural questions - that the partnership had grown so big it may no longer have been governable - and fall back on simplistic explanations like "greed". There is no sense of evolution, of how small decisions added up to something fundamental over the long haul. I can onlyh guess that the authors were ignorent of this. It also alrgely neglects the changes in personnel, in particular the purges that weeded out a huge number of experienced partners in favor of rainmakers who could bring in clients.
Recommended tepidly.
Rating: 
Summary: cursory and self serving
Review: This purports to be an insider's view of the demise of Arthur Andersen written by the person who ran the business ethics practice. Over and over, the author writes of her own lapses in judgment and then derides the actions of others who, more or less did the same thing --e.g. looked the other way for financial gain. The book is poorly edited and reptitive. There are a few interesting observations regarding the way AA attempted to teach ethics to others wihtout applying the same standards internally and an explanation worth thinking about as to how the culture of AA devolved from rigidly ethical to slavishly driven by revenues. The author has a strong academic background but my overall impression was that she saw an opportunity to write a book with commercial appeal and rushed out to do so --in some ways I felt this was the exact type of behavior which got AA into the trouble it was in in the first place. One thought I could not ignore --if things were so bad and the author saw so many problems and she was committed to business ethics --why did she not resign earlier rather than lasting there for 4 years. She gave some explanations but frankly this was superifically handled in light of her position.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Description of the Fall of an American Icon
Review: Very good book overall. As someone in the accounting profession, I found the book to be very interesting. Many defenders of Andersen do not realize that Enron was only one of many reasons that caused Andersen's demise. A string of other audit failures and a culture turned greedy also contributed to the demise. Former Andersen employees will give this book a poor rating, call it garbage, and point out that the author has it all wrong. However, a lot of what she mentions regarding the Andersen culture, Andersen's mad scramble for fees, and infighting within the firm are very well documented in many business articles. As someone who did not work at Andersen, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a good business book.
Rating: 
Summary: Should be in the fiction shelf
Review: Wow - I am impressed that Ms. Toffler can crank out that much fiction. It is obvious that she is incredibly bitter about Andersen (and business in general). It appears to me that Ms. Toffler was the one singular and only individual with in the firm that was beyond reproach.Final Accounting is an ambitious and obviously cleansing exercise for Ms. Toffler because she has failed at many of her endeavors. Those that know the facts of her departure from Andersen will find her version commical (and a little sad). The book could have been a great case study, and I am confident that there will be a balanced study of the facts and the tangible lessons. Too bad Final Accounting isn't it. Too bad it ignores the facts. Too bad it is long on slander and subtle character assasination and short on anything resembling fact. Good thing that Ms. Toffler can go back to her ivory tower and ignore the real world.
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