The auditing and consulting company EY was able to increase the number of its important auditing customers in the first financial year after the Wirecard scandal, despite the damage to its reputation.

This is shown by a look at the annual transparency report that EY posted on the Internet on Monday evening.

In the annex to the legally required report, the audit firm lists alphabetically all companies of public interest that have commissioned EY to audit their balance sheets.

If you count the names mentioned there, EY carried out statutory audits at 180 companies of particular interest to the public in the period from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021.

Mark Fehr

Editor in business.

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In the previous financial year, according to the transparency report at the time, EY had only provided these services for 163 such important clients - including the former Dax company Wirecard, which went into bankruptcy at the end of June 2020 and is no longer on the current list.

According to commercial law, there is public interest in a company if it is listed or if it is an insurance company or certain credit institutions.

Of course, this definition does not apply to all EY customers by a long way, so that the consideration here is only an excerpt - but an important one.

Because mandates of public interest are particularly decisive for future business in the long term, because the client attaches great importance to the reputation and skills of the auditor commissioned.

A comparison with the transparency report from the previous year shows that EY gained more than lost 17 important clients in the 2021 financial year.

Among the newly acquired EY clients with particularly well-known names, the DAX companies Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen with four other VW group companies as well as Deutsche Lufthansa, which has been relegated from the DAX, stand out.

The technology company Siemens Energy, which was promoted to the DAX in spring, was also added.

Its parent company Siemens was one of the EY clients last year.

New orders from Traton and Ergo

EY also carried out prominent new audit assignments for Traton, the former truck division of Volkswagen, and for a total of six Ergo Versicherung companies. Other important audit customers of EY added in the 2021 financial year include DKV Deutsche Krankenversicherung, Norisbank as a direct bank subsidiary of Deutsche Bank, the truck manufacturer MAN, the steel manufacturer Salzgitter and the Wüstenrot Bausparkasse.

Among the dropouts from the list of publicly significant EY examination customers, the first thing that catches the eye is the Dax member HeidelbergCement. When the change in auditor became known, however, the building materials manufacturer had emphasized that the decision had nothing to do with the Wirecard affair. Porsche Automobil Holding, ADAC Versicherung or the private bank Merck Finck were also no longer important mandates in the EY financial year 2021. The Axel Springer media group and the start-up company Rocket Internet have also disappeared from the list. In these two cases, however, EY retained the mandate, only the two companies are no longer public-interest companies due to their withdrawal from the stock exchange.

In its current transparency report, the auditing and consulting firm emphasizes that the top priority is to restore trust that has been lost in the Wirecard case and to strengthen trust in the quality of the audit.

EY therefore carried out an independent assessment of the events and drew conclusions from it.

So far, 2100 EY employees have received additional training in order to sharpen their awareness of risks and possible fraud.

In addition, EY is using new technologies to recognize warning signals in the balance sheets of clients as early as possible.

In addition, management departments were set up to promote and monitor the quality of the final exams.