Status: 03.04.2023 1:15 p.m
The auditing company EY had audited the allegedly falsified balance sheets of the former DAX group Wirecard for years. EY is now being sanctioned for breaches of professional duty.
The auditor supervisory authority APAS has imposed sanctions on the auditors of the consulting firm EY employed at Wirecard. When examining the financial statements of the former payment service provider in the years 2016 to 2018, APAS sees breaches of professional duty as proven, it announced today.
The sanctions were directed against the auditing company itself and five auditors. EY confirmed to have been informed of the completion of the Apas exam; But we don’t know the details yet.
Fine and no new mandates for two years
According to the APAS, the auditing company has to pay a fine of 500,000 euros. In addition, she was not allowed to carry out any statutory audits for companies of public interest for two years. The APAS announced that these were so-called new mandates. Existing mandates are excluded. According to the APAS, individual auditors were fined between EUR 23,000 and EUR 300,000.
In the next step, the notifications from the APAS are to be prepared, and those affected can then lodge an objection against them, it said.
Financial turnaround: punishment a clear sign
“This penalty is a clear sign. However, it must not be forgotten that the APAS also showed major deficiencies in dealing with the Wirecard case and acted as a toothless tiger for a long time,” said Konrad Duffy from the Finanzwende citizens’ movement on the sanctions .
In the future, APAS will have to be stronger and should no longer allow itself to make mistakes like those made by Wirecard, Duffy continued. The mechanisms that enabled Wirecard to have positive certificates despite the fraud have not been extensively changed. In order for certificates to mean more again, a lot has to happen at the auditing companies. “We are calling for joint audits to slowly break the market power of some companies and, above all, to make fraud more difficult, since two companies are auditing.” In addition, there should be a clear separation between advice and testing in order to prevent conflicts of interest.
Wirecard collapsed in the summer of 2020 after the board admitted that 1.9 billion euros allegedly booked in escrow accounts could not be found. The former Wirecard boss Markus Braun is currently being tried in Munich. The auditing company EY had audited the allegedly falsified balance sheets of the former DAX group for years.