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PwC auditors risk becoming the news at Corporate Travel
Deloitte, which replaced PwC as auditor for the travel group, has come in and started marking the latter’s homework. It doesn’t seem to like what it’s found.
Hannah WoottonColumnist
Aug 25, 2025 – 7.27pm
Just when PwC’s partners thought public scrutiny had moved on from their firm, a trio of their top auditors are again finding themselves edging towards the spotlight.
Corporate Travel Management reported on Friday that it had found material errors in its financial accounts that could go back years. The scope of the issue was not clear yet, it said, but it related to “certain aspects of [its] previous financial statements”.
PwC held Corporate Travel’s audit contract for 14 years. Luis Enrique Ascui
But if the fact that it delayed its full-year results by more than a week, and paused trading in its shares before announcing the problem, is anything to go by, it’s serious enough that you’d hate to be the accountant who signed off on those statements.
Which brings us to PwC. The big four firm was Corporate Travel’s auditor from when it first listed in 2010 until last year. The company then swapped to Deloitte.
Chairman Ewen Crouch was complimentary of PwC when announcing the change, thanking the firm for being “very important and helpful to the company”. But a competitive tender process based on “where audit practice is up to, where technology is, [and] where support is best provided” had prompted the change.
Why that process was initiated was unclear. Crouch said that “it is appropriate that a company in a period of time, review its audit arrangements”, but best practice guidelines put that at every 10 years. And as senators Deb O’Neill and Barb Pocock, not to mention the corporate regulator, frequently lament, few companies do thatanyway.
Regardless, Deloitte came in and its partner David Rodgers got to work marking PwC’s homework. And, it seems, he did not like what he found.
The most recent PwC partner to lead Corporate Travel’s audit was Kim Challenor, though she did so only for the 2024 financial year. Michael Crowe looked after it for the five years preceding her, and Michael Shewan for several years before that.
Crowe faced tough questioning by former VGI Partners executive Doug Tynan over Corporate Travel’s 2018 financial report, as part of broader accusations by the fund manager that the company was inflating its earnings.
Not that we are suggesting PwC or its partners were responsible for the issues. Or that other auditors wouldn’t have had issues, either.
Deloitte ran into trouble last year when auditing Web Travel. Its number crunchers thought they had found “an inappropriate use” of an accounting standard, prompting the company to announce that it would have to write down its earnings by $1.5 million. It turns out the auditors had just copied and pasted the wrong cells in a spreadsheet.
But auditing is a profession where clients want you to be seen, not heard, by the market. So PwC’s audit partners are in an uncomfortable position, at least until Corporate Travel reveals its problems.
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Hannah Wootton is a Rear Window columnist, based in Melbourne. Connect with Hannah on Twitter. Email Hannah at hannah.wootton@afr.com
