Governance and transparency

Reflections: why governance and transparency is important

A culture of transparency and robust governance is critical to enabling us to deliver our purpose - building trust in society and solving important problems. Explore the different roles our governance bodies play across our firm as we shine a spotlight on the audit practice. We also explain how we evolve our structures with a focus on risk governance, and publish our principal risks and executive remuneration to enable our stakeholders to better understand how we run our business.

Watch Samantha Barrass, Independent Non Executive, reflect on her first twelve months on PwC’s Public Interest Body as she shares her views on why governance and transparency is important.

Our governance and how we take decisions

We are a large partnership governed and managed by three main bodies each with a different role and responsibility.

The Management Board is our executive body responsible for the long term strategy of the firm and focused on delivering for our clients, our people and our external stakeholders in line with our purpose. Its membership includes the Executive Board who are responsible for the day to day leadership of the firm, and the Clients and Markets Executive who bring the industry and markets perspective direct from the business. Together the Management Board enables us to bring high quality services across our Audit, Consulting, Deals, Risk Assurance and Tax practices to deliver our strategy for all of our stakeholders.

The Supervisory Board is an oversight body comprised of elected partners from across our business and is designed to represent the interests of their peers who invest in the firm. Members of the Supervisory Board fulfil their responsibilities by listening to the feedback from the partnership and providing guidance or challenge to the executive on their behalf.

Our third governance body is the Public Interest Body, which has a majority of Independent Non Executives with a specific purpose to enhance confidence in the public interest aspects of our firm’s strategy and decision making. It oversees our business and holds our executive to account to ensure the public interest remains at the heart of our business activities.

Evolving our governance - a focus on risk

As the leading professional services firm we believe in continual improvement and always look for ways to enhance our governance practices. Watch Margaret Cole, Chief Risk Officer and General Counsel in discussion with Sir Ian Gibson, Independent Non Executive member of the Public Interest Body. Hear them talk about how we have evolved our approach to risk management to reflect the changing external environment and increasing expectations from our stakeholders around transparency.

Building trust and being transparent

At PwC we believe we build trust by acting ethically, with integrity and fairness, to do the right thing. Our leadership sets the tone from the top and this mindset is reinforced by our culture and values: to act with integrity, make a difference, care, work together and reimagine the possible.

That’s why we aim to give our stakeholders transparency across a diverse range of key topics that are important to them, including:

• Audit - which is at the heart of our business and our public interest responsibilities. To find out how we approach quality, our ethical requirements and policies see our Transparency Report.
• Our approach to setting executive remuneration.
• Making a constructive contribution to policy debates domestically and internationally.
• Setting our firm’s tax strategy which includes our Total Tax Contribution for FY19 and our approach to managing risk and developing good governance in relation to tax.
• Governance of the firm’s cyber operations and resilience led by Warwick Hunt, Managing Partner and COO and supported by our UK Chief Information Security Officer.

Further information on cyber governance, other relevant ethical requirements and details in relation to our continuous improvement approach to our policies and procedures, (in light of internal priorities or changes in the market) can be found in the Transparency Report.

Executive remuneration

As part of our commitment to transparency we publish details of our executive pay. Our partner remuneration is determined through a fair, robust and transparent income system aligned with the firm’s vision, culture and performance ambitions. Individual profit per partner depends on the overall profitability of the firm and is based on a number of factors including responsibility and performance across the firm’s strategic priorities. Remuneration for members of the Management Board is overseen by the Talent and Remuneration Committee. We’ve tracked our average profit per partner in relation to our average UK salary for a number of years, this enables us to ensure we are balancing being fair to our people with rewarding strong business performance. Find out more here.