MEPs Luis Garicano (Renew Europe, Spain) and Sven Giegold (Greens/EFA, Germany) called on the EU to reform its auditing rules on Tuesday 23 June in the wake of the accounting scandal involving the German payment service provider Wirecard.
Indeed, the company admitted on Monday that a sum of 1.9 billion euros, recorded on the company's balance sheet in 2019 but which the auditors had been unable to certify, "most probably does not exist", thus reinforcing the suspicions of fraud that led to the resignation of its boss, Markus Braun, last week.
"Wirecard is only the latest in a long history of accounting scandals. The weaknesses and problems revealed in the current case have been known for long. It is now time to finally address them", the two MPs wrote in a press release.
They call on the European Commission to review the Directive on statutory audits "as soon as possible". In their view, the current system, whereby accounting firms are selected and paid directly by the companies they control, gives them a strong incentive to satisfy their clients rather than to exercise effective control.
They also ask the Commission to examine whether the concentration of influence within the "Big Four" - PwC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG - hinders the effective exercise of statutory audit.
The two men also suggest that the European Parliament should organise a hearing on the Wirecard scandal to hear key witnesses to the case, in particular the German financial regulator and the European financial supervisory authorities. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)