The New Andersen’s IPO

After a three-month break obliged by the closure of my blog-hosting service, this New Years re-start aligns by coincidence with the recent initial public offering and NYSE listing of the Andersen Group Inc. 

Priced at $ 16 per share on December 16, ANDG opened for trading the next morning by popping up to $21, and has since moved around the mid-20s. 

Although I am usually successful at resisting the siren call of FOMO – no crypto for me, thank you – I bought a few shares. A tale worth unpacking is that this newly-public company may be a meme stock for geeks.  

For 19 years until my retirement in 2001, I was a senior in-house lawyer in the antecedent Arthur Andersen firm. I lived through the tumult of the 1990s leading to the acrimonious practice divorce and the official launch of Andersen Consulting as Accenture on January 1, 2001. I was watching close at hand both Accenture’s IPO on July 19, 2001, and the Andersen accounting and tax firm’s Enron-driven death spiral in 2002. 

Out of that wreckage, Silicon Valley-based Andersen tax partner Mark Vorsatz and a score of colleagues used the internal name of their niche practice group, Wealth and Tax Advisory Services, to convene a distinctly new firm, WTAS, to provide tax and related advice to private companies and wealthy individuals. 

As Vorsatz spells out in his CEO letter at page 119 of the Andersen S-1 and summarized here, success followed – shortly, as an independently treated subsidiary of HSBC as its source of financial support, and then free-standing after a buy-out in 2007. 

Not without skeptical commentary, the rapidly-growing firm acquired the right to the old Andersen brand and trademark, and globally adopted the Andersen name in 2014. Those who questioned that naming strategy are now left disarmed, both by the upstart firm’s continued expansion in the US, now ranked by Inside Public Accounting as 18^th among the large firms with 2024 revenue of $731 million, and in its international growth to 185 offices, 2,900 partners and 44,000 employees. 

The firm’s growth has been nothing if not unconventional., with a particular twist. Although organized as an accounting firm, the new Andersen has from its birth disavowed any interest or aspiration to provide audits – the traditional independent financial information assurance first delivered by William Welch Deloitte in 1850 and still today a core service of the profession. As Vorsatz writes, the founders’ ambition was “a global multi-dimensional firm that did not have an audit practice and was free from even the perception of conflicts.” 

There’s more to it. Vorsatz made his bones in the region and the era when the accounting firms were awash in the class action lawsuits that plagued Silicon Valley. He would have ample memory on which to base steadfast opposition to pursuit of the risk-laden audits of publicly-listed companies. 

And why not? He’d have learned at his mentors’ knees that a viable business model under the relentless equation – Assets minus Liabilities equals Equity – requires not only successful client promotion, engagement execution, and collection of a satisfactory amount of fees, but also the avoidance of the debilitating drain of litigation claims, settlements and jury verdicts. 

What better way to avoid the potentially fatal blow of an Enron debacle, in other words, than to forego an audit practice altogether. 

And that’s not considering the positives of an audit-free business model: 

• Not being registered with the PCAOB to audit SEC registrants – avoids the meddlesome intrusion of a nosy regulator.
• Not being constrained within the compliance requirements of independence inflicted by the SEC and its equivalents – free to pursue clients and relationships not available to the Big Four.
• Not being barred by regulatory obligations imposed or threatened against statutory auditors – free to pursue non-financial advisory and consulting in the expanding areas of Sustainability, cyber and AI, while controlling exposure through use of contractual and other tools of risk management and loss avoidance. 

Leadership of the new Andersen has clearly not been reluctant to make large plans.  Spring-boarding beyond its initial focus, its tax practice has extended, as Vorsatz’s letter spells out, “to include corporate, international, compensation and benefits, investment funds, transfer pricing and valuation.” 

As a further invocation of its legacy, the company has even revived the Andersen Consulting brand from the past under which to offer global-scale business and technology oriented services, going so far as to recruit and install as its CEO the former leader of the pre-divorce AC practice, George Shaheen.    

Lest a notably innovative project escape all criticism, Jonathan Weil in the Wall Street Journal for December 29, 2025 (here behind the paywall), reasonably questioned: 

• A corporate structure of labyrinthine complexity.
• A classified share model that limits the influence of the public shareholders.
• A direction of revenues that favors and protects the positions of the insiders. 

Weil’s observations, however salient, may rather miss a broader point. Whether or not influenced by his exegesis, investors in the two days after his reporting bumped ANDG’s share price up to close for the year at $ 25.93. 

Which is to say, investor decisions once grounded on the perceived value of traditional financial reporting and an associated auditor’s opinion increasingly appear to look elsewhere. Investment decisions and capital are flowing toward crypto ventures and AI projects of ever-shadier presence and prospects, and third-part capital has decided that, for the time being at least, accounting firms are to be viewed as viable investment targets that are safe, stable and predictable.   

Which may hark to the echoes of history ringing in the background – notably Accenture’s 2001 IPO, launched at a share price of $ 14.50 – giving reason to believe that even while alumni of the old Andersen may treat themselves well in their current incarnations, there is value to be had in riding their coat-tails. 

That is, commentators in the accounting sector had long derided the long-term viability of Andersen Consulting, even as it grew from an in-house skunk works to its robust size in 2001. Its history since – trading at as much as $ 400, and recently sitting around $ 260 – has allowed its leaders to bask in the glow of its financial success even while thumbing their noses at their critics. 

Corridor gossip at the time of Accenture’s IPO was that senior members of the legacy Andersen accounting practice, freed of the requirements of independence from consorting with their erstwhile brethren, quietly piled into Accenture’s stock – a prescient strategy that for those with both foresight and patience has provided considerable mitigation of the pain as the accounting firm descended into chaos and failure.

What will the future hold? The clichés of commentary seldom have literal application, but in watching ANDG with interest, I would not be selling Mark Vorsatz and his company short.    

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