PricewaterhouseCoopers

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PricewaterhouseCoopers GmbH auditing company

logo
legal form Company with limited liability
founding 1924
Seat Frankfurt am Main , GermanyGermanyGermany 
management Ulrich Störk
Number of employees 11,809
sales 2.3 billion euros
Branch Business consulting , auditing , tax advice
Website www.pwc.de
Status: Template: FormatDate : No valid ISO date!Template: FormatDate / Maintenance / Error

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is a German company with headquarters in Frankfurt am Main . It employs 11,145 people (June 2018); the annual turnover in the 2017/2018 financial year was 2.2 billion euros. Core services are auditing and audit-related services, tax advice as well as classic business and management advice , transaction advice and corporate finance . The company's headquarters are in Frankfurt in Tower 185 , a skyscraper in the Gallus district. The company is part of the PricewaterhouseCoopers International network .

history

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PwC was created by amalgamating the business operations of C & L Deutsche Revision Aktiengesellschaft Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft, which has meanwhile been merged into PwC AG, and Price Waterhouse GmbH Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft, both based in Frankfurt am Main.

These two predecessor companies of PwC were auditing companies with a long tradition, which at the time of the merger in 1998 could look back on a partially over 100-year history. The historical development in Germany began in 1924.

  • 1849 Samuel Lowell Price founds an auditing firm in London
  • 1854 William Cooper founds an auditing firm in London
  • 1865 The two audit firms merge
  • 1924 Opening of an office in Germany
  • 1924 the C&L Deutsche Revision Aktiengesellschaft Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft is created through a merger of the Treuhand-Vereinigung Aktiengesellschaft, founded in 1905 and based in Frankfurt am Main, and the Treuarbeit Aktiengesellschaft founded in 1922, based in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main.
  • 1995 Treuhand-Vereinigung AG and Treuarbeit AG enter the market together under the name C & L Deutsche Revision
  • In 1998, the C & L German auditing and Price Waterhouse GmbH normal business at PwC German Revision Aktiengesellschaft Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft continued
  • 2005 Change of name to PricewaterhouseCoopers AG WPG
  • In 2012 part of the PwC Europe holding , which today also includes Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey and Switzerland
  • 2014 Takeover of Booz & Company GmbH (today: PwC Strategy &) based in Düsseldorf
  • 2016 Change of legal form to PricewaterhouseCoopers GmbH WPG

Ulrich Störk has been the management spokesman since July 1, 2018. He succeeded Norbert Winkeljohann , who left the Management Board on June 30, 2018. His predecessor, in turn, Hans Wagener , who reached the age limit and left the board on June 30, 2010.

The company has 21 locations. In addition to Frankfurt, PwC has the second largest German branch in Düsseldorf . In 2015, PwC relocated 600 employees from the Frankfurt administration to Düsseldorf for cost reasons, where around 1,800 employees worked for PwC in 2015. A pan-European administrative unit is to be set up there. Due to the increase in staff in Düsseldorf and the subsidiary PwC Strategy & (Germany) GmbH, between 2,500 and 2,900 people are already working for PwC in 2019.

Group structure

  • PwC Europe SE auditing company
  • PricewaterhouseCoopers GmbH auditing company
    • WIBERA Wirtschaftsberatung Aktiengesellschaft Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft (100%)
    • PricewaterhouseCoopers Corporate Finance Beratung GmbH (100%)
    • PricewaterhouseCoopers PRTM Management Consultants GmbH
    • PwC FS Tax GmbH auditing company
    • PricewaterhouseCoopers cundus Aktiengesellschaft
    • PricewaterhouseCoopers Legal AG law firm
    • PricewaterhouseCoopers Cyber ​​Security Services GmbH
    • PricewaterhouseCoopers Solutions GmbH

Business areas

PwC's fields of activity are divided into the following three areas:

  • Assurance
  • Tax & Legal
  • Advisory

The area Assurance , ie the area under which the "classical" auditing activities, was making doing business with a share of 46 percent of a high-volume range of PwC in Germany.

Business areas

  • Transactions, Financing and Investment
  • Reorganization, restructuring and forensic services
  • Strategy, organization, processes and systems
  • Accounting, reporting and auditing
  • Tax and commercial law advice
  • Industry regulation
  • Knowledge transfer
  • Legal advice

PwC also plays an influential role in the state sector through government contracts, for example all applications for guarantees to the German Economic Fund are examined by PwC.

For several years now, PwC has also been a manufacturer of business software that is marketed in the PwC Digital Store. For example, the Digital Fitness App or the Data Protection Manager are part of the consulting company's software portfolio.

PwC Foundation

The “Youth - Education - Culture” foundation was set up as an initiative by PwC executives. The foundation has existed since December 2002. It works under the umbrella of the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft . The PwC Foundation focuses on promoting cultural education among children and young people. To this end, it says it supports innovative projects that give children and young people access to culture. Since then she has supported around 200 projects with a total of almost six million euros.

PwC Legal Austria

PwC Legal is part of PwC's global legal network, which has 3,500 lawyers in more than 90 countries. PwC Legal is considered a pioneer in the application of legal tech and the use of modern, intelligent tools.

PwC Legal has also existed in Austria since July 1, 2016 and is represented by the independent law firm oehner & partner rechtsanwaelte gmbh, which advises around 30 lawyers and prospective professionals in all key areas of commercial law.

Due to its interdisciplinary orientation, PwC Legal can also competently solve legal questions from a tax and economic point of view. In this case, PwC Legal can also fall back on the expertise of the world's leading auditing and consulting company.

Christian Öhner is Partner and Head of Legal at PwC Legal Austria. Previously he was a partner in the M&A practice of Wolf Theiss and the law firm oehner petsche pollak attorneys-at-law and worked for The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.

Lukas Röper - formerly Head of Legal Department at Sberbank Europe - is also a partner and Head of Financial Services at PwC Legal. Lukas Röper is one of the leading Austrian experts with more than 13 years of professional experience in the fields of financial services, banking and banking supervisory law. After working for large international law firms in Vienna and London (including Skadden Arps), Lukas Röper was General Counsel at leading banking and financial institutions. He acted as the single point of contact (SPOC) for regulatory matters with the FMA, OeNB and ECB. In addition, he headed the general secretariats of these banks and himself held supervisory board positions in subsidiary banks. Lukas Röper regularly advises international banking and financial institutions on banking and capital market law and on all questions of banking supervisory law (also with regard to going-to-market concepts for banking products). In addition, he handles complex financing transactions. Lukas Röper is a certified compliance and data protection officer and author of numerous publications and gives regular lectures.

PwC transparency award

Since 2005, PwC, together with the Georg-August University of Göttingen (Chair for Accounting and Auditing), has been awarding a transparency prize to German donation organizations with the DZI donation seal . The award of the prize is based primarily on the analysis of the annual report of the participating organizations. Other publications are also included in the evaluation with a lower weighting. The information is evaluated using a catalog of criteria. The award is given to transparency with regard to the use of donations, goals, activities and financial situation. With the award, PwC wants to contribute to the "improvement of the information policy" of non-profit organizations.

The transparency award was originally awarded annually. Since 2010 it has been advertised every two years.

PwC in the press

Bookkeeping for Yukos

PwC has been an auditor for the Russian oil company Yukos since 1995 . In the course of the break-up of the group and the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky , who was convicted of fraud and tax evasion, he was always able to refer to the reports of the PwC auditors, which certify that the bookkeeping was flawless . After the state pressure on PricewaterhouseCoopers Russia rose sharply in 2007 - PwC itself was exposed to tax evasion proceedings , had to pay 290 million rubles (8.3 million euros) in taxes and is being prosecuted for alleged aiding and abetting tax evasion in the Yukos case all audit reports for the years 1995 to 2004 were withdrawn due to new findings that were not further named. In October 2008, the lawsuit against PwC was dropped and the case closed.

Impeccable balance sheet report despite booking errors of € 55.5 billion

In October 2011, the Stern magazine reported that the federally owned bad bank FMS Wertmanagement , which was spun off from Hypo Real Estate (HRE), had a booking error of 55.5 billion euros in the balance sheet for the short financial year 2010 is. In addition, the balance sheet showed the interest result too high. The PwC auditors had certified that FMS-Wertmanagement had a perfect balance sheet. After jointly clarifying the facts, the Federal Ministry of Finance discovered a communication problem between the banks involved. At least that's what Finance Minister Schäuble said to the public. According to Schäuble, the auditing firm PwC helped clarify the situation and find answers to open questions.

In November 2011, however, the Deutsche Bundesbank found PwC complicit in the accounting error at FMS-Wertmanagement in an investigation that was kept under lock and key. The auditors "did not check thoroughly enough," they say. PwC could have recognized the error. According to media reports, PwC also admitted that.

Due to the undiscovered balance sheet mishap for 2010, the auditors' professional supervision, the Wirtschaftsprüferkammer, initiated professional proceedings against the responsible auditor at PwC according to their own press release on October 31, 2011. As the radio station NDR Info reported on February 27, 2013, the Chamber of Public Accountants concluded this procedure in June 2012 without publishing its judgment.

Luxleaks

In the Luxembourg Leaks scandal, whistleblowers published 28,000 pages of internal documents in November 2014, which showed that PwC had concluded 548 binding advance tax rulings with the Luxembourg tax authorities between 2002 and 2010 . The preliminary rulings guaranteed 343 corporations , including Apple, Amazon, Heinz, Pepsi, Ikea and Deutsche Bank, a legally binding low taxation. Whistleblowers had passed the documents on to journalists. The evaluation and publication of the " leaked " documents was carried out in international collaboration between several newspapers and broadcasters and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). According to the research, these tax liability agreements allow companies to avoid significant amounts of tax . As a result of the publications, the EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager announced that she would intensify ongoing investigations into whether European state aid law had been violated.

Sachsen LB and their emergency sale

In several dramatic meetings in August 2007, Sachsen LB was "emergency sold" to the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) after a risk of EUR 17.3 billion in the Irish subprime business had emerged and receivables from it were due at short notice . SachsenLB's auditor was PwC, which in particular issued the unqualified certificate for the 2004 to 2006 annual financial statements. These were later declared null and void by the Stuttgart Regional Court. The auditor of these annual financial statements, the company PwC, avoided a public process and in 2011 transferred an amount of 40 million euros to the Free State of Saxony.

Cross Border Leasing (CBL)

As a consultant in Germany, PwC brokered and supported cross-border leasing transactions between German municipalities and US investors.

Web links

Commons : PricewaterhouseCoopers  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Website PwC, About us / organizational structure .
  2. ↑ a b Consolidated financial statements as of June 30, 2019 , bundesanzeiger.de, accessed on August 18, 2020
  3. ↑ Website pwc.de, reports , accessed on March 20, 2019
  4. ↑ Website PwC, We about us / company information / history ( Memento of the original dated November 5, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.pwc.de
  5. ^ PricewaterhouseCoopers: PwC Europe. Retrieved November 6, 2019 (nl-nl).
  6. ^ Federal Gazette: PwC Strategy & (Germany) GmbH annual financial statements 2015 .
  7. ↑ Financial Times Deutschland Head of the Day: Winkeljohann - The Examined Examiner ( Memento from January 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on January 26, 2010
  8. ↑ pwc.de: Locations , accessed on March 8, 2018
  9. ↑ Panagiotis Koutoumanos: Frankfurt loses 600 PwC jobs. Retrieved December 27, 2019 .
  10. ↑ Florian Rinke: This woman has achieved the impossible - career despite part-time. Retrieved December 27, 2019 .
  11. ^ PricewaterhouseCoopers: Düsseldorf location. Retrieved December 27, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Tagesschau: PwC checks, the state guarantees ( memento of July 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), July 8, 2009
  13. ↑ Digital Store - PwC Germany. Retrieved May 8, 2020 .
  14. ↑ PwC website, software solutions on the digital store. Retrieved May 6, 2020 .
  15. ^ Website PwC, We about us / Engagement / PwC Foundation .
  16. ↑ Extrajournal / PwC Austria starts the Legal Tech Offensive .
  17. ^ Website PwC Legal .
  18. ^ Website PwC, About Us .
  19. ^ Website PwC Legal / Our team .
  20. ↑ Extrajournal, PwC Austria starts the Legal Tech Offensive .
  21. ↑ Juve, changing sides Ex General Counsel of Sberbank joins Öhner .
  22. ↑ Juve, Sberbank Establishing the legal department in record time .
  23. ↑ Economy & Law, EUROJURIS AWARD 2009 to Lukas Röper .
  24. ^ Website PwC, About Us / Commitment / Transparency Award (PDF; 197 kB).
  25. ^ Website PwC, About Us / Commitment / Transparency Award
  26. ^ Withdrawal of Yukos Audit Reports , June 24, 2007.
  27. ^ The Wall Street Journal , October 27, 2008.
  28. ↑ Auditors reject guilt. In: FAZ.net . October 31, 2011, accessed May 24, 2016 .
  29. ↑ Andreas Mihm: Schäuble names HRE booking breakdowns cleared up. In: FAZ.net . November 2, 2011, accessed May 24, 2016 .
  30. ↑ Hans-Martin Tillack: 55 billion error at HRE: Were the auditors to blame? In: stern.de . November 23, 2011, accessed May 24, 2016 .
  31. ↑ Press reports about booking errors at FMS Wertmanagement. In: wpk.de. October 31, 2011, archived from the original on January 29, 2012 ; accessed on May 24, 2016 .
  32. ↑ 55 billion balance sheet error at HRE-Bad Bank: Auditors hold back investigation report. In: presseportal.de. February 27, 2013, accessed May 24, 2016 .
  33. ^ NDR: Luxemburg Leaks: Criticism of Juncker is growing , November 7, 2014
  34. ↑ Ulrich Wolf: Dramatic days in August and what became of those involved. In: Saxon newspaper . 26./27. August 2017, p. 3. Documentation of the process of the sale of SachsenLB in August 2007 and the aftermath. 1st part also (online) . Retrieved August 12, 2020.
  35. ↑ zeit.de: Cross-Border-Leasing: Sold for stupid
  36. ↑ spiegel.de: The big sale