Serving clients and sustaining our business in an ethical and responsible way

To get an understanding of how PwC commits to our role in the marketplace, learn about:

Our role as professional service providers
At PwC, we play a significant role in the world’s capital markets and take pride that our services, help to improve the credibility, transparency and reliability of financial statements and information that help guide investors and stakeholders to make informed decisions. We have a responsibility to uphold and embody ethics, transparency and integrity within every aspect of our work. We have an ability to be leaders in developing trust within business, and to use our skills and relationships to influence the marketplace to promote more ethical and responsible behaviour. By exemplifying responsible leadership, we can make a difference to the success of our clients, people and communities combined, and illustrate the ways that sustainability is a core component of strong governance and organizational accountability.

Our marketplace initiatives in FY2012 reflect our ongoing efforts to integrate good corporate responsibility practices into our own business operations, and to look for opportunities to lead the debate on issues impacting our profession. To that end, we have continued to develop thought leadership publications on a variety of topics that utilize our people’s diversity of experience—including business, science, the arts and engineering—which provide our clients with a depth of perspectives to help them tackle complex organizational issues. We have also undertaken an economic impact analysis to help quantify our firm’s impact on the marketplace, as well as provided a detailed summary of how our firm’s sponsorships are creating tangible impacts for our communities.

How we do business
In FY2012, we developed new and enhanced policies and processes within the firm to help improve our governance frameworks and to ensure we provided formal opportunities for dialogue amongst our employees around important workplace issues. We also developed an environmental policy that includes a number of overarching principles and provides guidelines on how to address environmental issues related to our operations. To read our environmental policy, please visit our website at www.pwc.com/ca/cr.

In order to ensure continued compliance with our global, national and corporate responsibility reporting requirements, we undertook a review of our corporate contributions policies. This included a review of current definitions, current spending and alignment of our national and local donation, sponsorship and business development initiatives.

We launched a Health and Safety microsite on our Portal. The site includes the video “Ergonomic Essentials for the Office” that helps staff arrange their work stations and provides tips to avoid muscular skeletal injuries. The Health and Safety microsite is also a spot where our Health and Safety committee can post meeting minutes, share updates and information and promote wellness events taking place in a particular office or across the country. We will be monitoring the site during FY2013 to understand how staff are using and acting on the information shared.

In FY2012, we delivered interactive virtual training on tax knowledge over a one-week period to 658 partners and managers. Participants were offered 11 tax technical sessions developed and facilitated by industry experts. The use of a virtual classroom environment allowed our people in every office to learn from and consult with our industry experts in live interactive sessions and strengthen their industry knowledge.

The Audit and Assurance Technical Update Program was also revised in FY2012. This flagship program provides key technical accounting and auditing updates to more than 1,500 partners and staff in our Audit and Assurance Group. We used an e-learning design to ensure that our people obtained key technical updates in a consistent way and combined it with an engagement team workshop that helped each team apply the new knowledge to their unique client situation. This blended approach maximized transfer of learning as each engagement team developed an action plan that outlined how the technical updates are applied to the work performed on such clients.

Our focus on ethics and transparency
A key component of our overall CR strategy is supporting strong ethical and transparent business practices across the entire enterprise and all that we do. One of the ways we do this is by developing our people’s responsible leadership skills, but we have numerous other initiatives. These include:

• Our code of conduct
• Ethics hotlines
• E-learn sessions
• Risk management
• Canadian independence training
• Anti-money laundering training
• Privacy policies
• Obligations to report under rules of professional conduct

We also have an ethics and business conduct leader who provides oversight to our reporting processes. Each year, all of our people are required to participate in interactive independence training sessions as well as complete an annual confirmation with respect to their personal responsibilities as they relate to independence and firm compliance. In FY2012, we achieved a 100% completion of compliance confirmation (FY2011: 99.8%).

Our role in creating a sustainable society
PwC is the market leader in providing sustainability services to large global organizations. Our sustainability teams operate in over 40 countries helping organizations integrate sustainable business practices into the very fabric of their processes, systems and supply chains.

We provide assistance to clients to build business value by evaluating the entire sustainability picture—both challenges and opportunities—and incorporating effective solutions for CR programs, climate change, CR reporting, and chain of custody/supply chain risk management and sustainability management systems. Our Canadian practice is part of a Global Sustainable Business Solutions (SBS) network comprised of 500 practitioners in 40 countries, serving 50 of the Fortune 100 companies.

As we strive to be catalysts for change, we have provided Consulting and Deals, Tax and Audit and Assurance services through our SBS practice to a wide range of clients since the 1990s. Our clients are from a range of industries including retail, entertainment and media, mining, energy and utilities, and forest and paper.

We are also proud to have achieved accreditation from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as a Greenhouse Gas Verification body in FY2012, as well as accreditation as a certification body for the Forest Stewardship Council Chain of Custody Standard.

Connecting with the marketplace and thought leadership
As a way to help lead conversations related to our corporate responsibility initiatives and the ways we’ve integrated this into our business operations, we launched the following initiatives in FY2012:

• PwC’s Public Sector and Government practice launched the Citizen Compass, an online initiative designed to provide Canadians with a platform to voice their opinions on current issues and events through informed participation and deliberation. Over a three-week period in FY2012, a total of 3,147 every-day Canadians addressed the central question, “What does the future of government e-services look like?” The results of the dialogue are shown in the infographics and spell out the role that PwC can play during FY2013 in working with government stakeholders to communicate and disseminate these important views.
• Upfront™ is a new multi-channel program that brings leading executives together to discuss the critical trends impacting the direction of Canadian business. With a focus on growth and competitiveness; new dimensions for talent; technology and innovation; risk resilience; and business and sustaining trust; the publication aligns well with the new Corporate Responsibility strategy and highlights how CR is already embedded into smart and strategic decision making in the c-suite. The publication was distributed to over 4,000 c-suite executives in FY2012, with plans on developing an ongoing and updated dialogue each quarter in FY2013.
• PwC NextGen Global Study: During FY2012, we participated in a PwC global study conducted by the University of Southern California (USC) and the London Business School. The study was designed to help us better understand how the motivations and values of our people differ across generations. The results will help us create actionable solutions to improve PwC and remain an employer of choice for young professionals in Canada and around the world. The study included interviews across Canada and focus groups in certain offices. As well, 50 of our millennial staff were invited to participate in NextGen Live, a global Jam session that included more than 1,000 PwC millennials from around the world. The Jam took place over three days with one hour each day dedicated to giving the next generation the opportunity to engage in a dialogue around how to thrive in one’s career, unique work styles, use of technology and social media, emerging styles of leadership and how life and career are intertwined. Several Canadian leaders, including our CEO, line of service (LoS) and Human Capital leaders, also participated. The Jam sessions built upon the ongoing results from PwC’s annual Millenials at Work survey: a total of 4,364 university graduates from across 75 countries took part in the study between 31 August and 7 October 2011. The results of the study found that millennials are attracted to employer brands that they admire as consumers. In 2008, 88% were looking for employers with CSR values that matched their own, and 86% would consider leaving an employer whose values no longer met their expectations. Fast forward three years and just over half are attracted to employers because of their CSR position and 56% would consider leaving an employer that didn’t have the values they expected.

PwC’s workshop on CSR Trends in the extractive industries, May 2012
In May 2012, PwC hosted a workshop focused on trends in the extractive industries related to transparency, scarcity and public perception. The workshop was hosted in partnership with the Canadian Institute of Mining (CIM) and the Centre for Excellence in Corporate Social Responsibility.

PwC’s National Leader of our Sustainable Business Solutions Practice, Bruce McIntyre, along with team member Janice Plumstead presented the results from two recent PwC thought leadership papers on topics related to sustainability reporting trends in the mining industry and minerals and metals scarcity.

PwC co-hosted the afternoon session with the Centre for Excellence in Corporate Social Responsibility on the topic of transparency issues within the extractive industry. Stakeholders from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academia, government, First Nations, and industry associations attended the conversation. Their thoughts and experiences will be used to inform future events and publications.

Responsible Business and the Marketplace