Wirecard: Chronicle, Public Allegations, and the Downfall of the Company

Wirecard is the biggest economic scandal in Europe since the Second World War. Within just one week, Wirecard collapsed. Thousands of shareholders lost their savings and lawsuits were filed against Wirecard, the supervisory authorities, the management board, and the auditor. We provide a brief chronicle of Wirecard—the steep climb and the deep fall after about twenty years. The company was founded in 1999, reorganized between 2002 and 2004, and afterward listed on the stock exchange. It was admitted to the TecDAX in 2006 and replaced Commerzbank in the DAX in 2018. On 25 June 2020, Wirecard applied with the responsible district court in Munich to open insolvency proceedings due to impending insolvency and excessive indebtedness. As a result, the share price collapsed almost completely. Actually, the first rumors against accounting arose in 2008 but then died down for a time. New rumors against Wirecard have been coming up since 2015 and have become increasingly concrete since this year. We highlight these rumors, which ultimately should have been red flags for the auditor. And there has been a whole series of alarm signals with high relevance for the orientation of the risk-oriented audit approach by the auditor.