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PricewaterhouseCoopers
- Location & Contact Information
- Address, Directions, & Map
- Hay's Galleria, 1 Hay's Lane, London, England, United Kingdom
- GPS Coordinates
- Telephone Numbers:
- [44] (20) 7583 5000
- [44] (20) 7822 4652 (fax)
- Official Website: [1]
- Address, Directions, & Map
- Overview & Photographs
The firm was created by the merger of two large firms "Price Waterhouse" and "Coopers & Lybrand" in 1998. These two firms each had histories dating back to the nineteenth century. [1]
Price Waterhouse
Samuel Lowell Price, an accountant, started his practice in London in 1849. In 1865 Price went into partnership with William Hopkins Holyland and Edwin Waterhouse. Holyland left shortly after to work alone in accountancy and the firm was known from 1874 as Price, Waterhouse & Co. (The '& Co' and comma were dropped from the name much later.) The original partnership agreement, signed by Price, Holyland and Waterhouse could be found in Southwark Towers, one of PwC's important legacy offices (now under demolition) in London. [1]
By the late nineteenth century, Price Waterhouse had gained significant recognition as an accounting firm. As a result of trade between the United Kingdom and the United States of America, Price Waterhouse opened an office in New York in 1890, and the American firm itself soon expanded rapidly. The original British firm opened an office in Liverpool in 1904 and then elsewhere in the United Kingdom and countries abroad, each time establishing a separate partnership in each country: the worldwide practice of PW was therefore a federation of collaborating firms that had grown organically rather than being the result of an international merger. [1]
In a further effort to take advantage of economies of scale, PW and Arthur Andersen had discussed a merger in 1989 but the negotiations failed mainly because of conflicts of interest such as Andersen's strong commercial links with IBM and PW's audit of IBM. [1]
Coopers & Lybrand
In 1854 William Cooper established his own practice in London, which became Cooper Brothers seven years later when his three brothers joined. [1]
In the USA in 1898 Robert H. Montgomery, William M. Lybrand, Adam A. Ross Jr. and his brother T. Edward Ross formed Lybrand, Ross Brothers and Montgomery. Coopers & Lybrand is the result of a merger in 1957 between Cooper Brothers & Co; Lybrand, Ross Bros & Montgomery and a Canadian firm McDonald, Currie and Co. In 1990 in certain countries including the UK Coopers & Lybrand merged with Deloitte Haskins & Sells to become Coopers & Lybrand Deloitte, in 1992 renamed Coopers & Lybrand. [1]
Merger
In 1998 Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand merged to form PricewaterhouseCoopers in an attempt to gain a scale that would put the new firm in a different league. [1]
Sarbanes-Oxley Act
The 2002 indictment of Enron and WorldCom and the subsequent collapse of Arthur Andersen resulted in calls for stringent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules on auditor independence. One such result was the adoption of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which required auditor independence and separation of core audit from general consulting. This forced many of the Big Four to divest their interests in management consulting. However, a major part of the firm's practice is still to provide business advice in addition to its auditing services, notably in taxation and corporate finance. [1]
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