Accenture was spun out of Andersen Consulting after the Enron saga. Andersen had both a consulting business and an audit arm - they were one of the “big five” audit firms before the collapse of Enron. Today, Accenture only do consulting; they do zero auditing. EY are not related to Accenture or Andersen. EY is an audit firm (one of the “big four”) with a massive consulting arm. Unlike Accenture which is a global firm, EY operates more like a local franchise. They do this to minimise risk of contagion from a bad apple like in Germany to other audit businesses in different countries. As such, EY is far from a global firm, but more like a collection of separate audit and consulting firms in different countries who all have a license to use the EY brand. This is an important difference.