Last week, payments firm Wirecard admitted that €1.9bn of its cash probably never existed — and then it collapsed. It turns out that the German group’s auditors had failed for at least three years to request crucial account information from a Singapore bank where Wirecard said it had up to €1bn. Instead, EY relied on documents and screenshots provided by a third-party trustee and Wirecard itself.
To some, the story sounded remarkably familiar. In 2003, questions were swirling about Parmalat, a big Italian food group. Back then, Bank of America said that a document purporting to show that one of Parmalat’s offshore affiliates held €3.9bn in its account had been forged. Days later, Parmalat went into administration. Deloitte, the group’s main auditor from 1999 until its collapse, later agreed to pay $149m to the company and $8.5m to investors.
But that was not the only time a big auditor had displayed a remarkable lack of curiosity about how and where big companies keep their money. In 2010, JPMorgan Chase admitted to mixing up to $23bn in client money with its own funds in an unsegregated account for seven years. Auditor PwC, which had repeatedly certified that the bank was properly handling client money, was later fined £1.4m, a record for a UK accountancy firm at the time.