Shares in digital payment company Wirecard went up almost 7 percent on Monday (Oct. 21), following news of an independent audit by KPMG.
Bloomberg is reporting that the news is an attempt to try and make investors feel better about the company and its reported accounting issues.
Wirecard said the auditing company will have “unrestricted access to all information on all levels of the group.” The audit follows a report in the Financial Times that accused the company of accounting irregularities. Wirecard said answers to those particular accusations will be shown in “due course.”
“We have complete confidence in the audit procedures performed to date and their results,” Chairman Wulf Matthias said in the statement. “We assume this renewed independent review will lead to a final end to all further speculation.”
The shares gained as much as 6.6 percent on Monday, which is the company’s largest intraday gain since April.
The FT report brought back concerns from earlier in the year about the company’s accounting practices, despite Wirecard dismissing the accusations and saying that it was previously audited by Ernst & Young.
Wirecard said it was going to buy back about $223 million in stock to help regain confidence. The audit, according to Knut Woller, an analyst at Baader Bank, will help to bring “final clarity to the accusations raised by the FT.”
Woller rated the stock a “buy.”
Wirecard has been attempting to repair its image after the FT articles. KPMG is the third outside entity to try to help the company accomplish that goal.
Ernst & Young was called in for the audit of the annual report, and Singapore law firm Rajah & Tann was brought in to do a deep dive into the company’s accounting methods. It didn’t find any criminal activity linked to the company’s headquarters, but the law firm discovered some accounting oversights and the possibility of criminal fault for some employees in Singapore.
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