Ethics and governance in the European Financial centers

PwC Luxembourg put recently online a video clip, which is an ad for CSR, to show its involvement in Corporate Social Responsibility actions.

The company does definitely a lot for the community.

But when looking carefully the video there is a question: To what extent another company with money and that is not an auditor would do other things?

In other words the video does not focus on what CSR implies actually for an auditor.

Five values are quoted in an agenda:
- Market place
- Environment
- People
- Culture
- Ethics

Ethics should have been the first value .


Let's analyse the film with the time allocated for each topic (time of the start of the topic):

Introduction : 00:00
Agenda : 00:32
Market Place : 00:37
Environment : 01:26
People : 02:13
Culture : 04:13
Ethics : 05:26

Ethics is given 00:04 seconds in the videoclip. Topics coming after 05:30 have nothing to do with ethics especially for an auditor : These are :
- People Survey (05:30) : The picture of the "Code of conduct" appears a fraction of second at 05:39
- Staff day (05:44)
- PwC serving the city of Esch/Alzette (05:45)
- Brainstorming with Nicolas Vanier (05:51)
- CSR rôle-play (05:58)
- PwC for nature (06:00)
- Staff Satisfaction (06:05)


Conclusion : 06:20
End : 07:03

We can conclude that the whole film has a duration of 423 seconds (7:03 minutes) of which 4 seconds (5 with the picture of the "Code of Conduct") are relating to ethics but just to show a title : there is unfortunately no examples of implemented and proved ethics for the auditor in the framework of CSR.

I hope ethics concerns are not allocated only 0.012% (5/423) of the time in the framework of audit assignments.

PwC is definitely a good company but I find it a pity that they should not realise the risks in a business world with more and more transparency and where dysfunctions will be less and less tolerated all the more than they are public and official and take place in a small country where everybody knows everyone. Furthermore Luxembourg is no longer a sanctuary : other countries may involve auditors in Luxembourg.

I wish I could help them. I sent many applications with no result. I must be too faithful for the business. But I think I would abide by the "Code of conduct" and help staff to respect it, provided that it is not a charade.





Video

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