One of the larger recent scandals in the ESG investing world involves DWS Group, a German asset management firm mostly owned by Deutsche Bank. In August, The Wall Street Journal broke the news that DWS was misleading clients and investors about the scope and quality of its ESG efforts. The firm's former sustainability chief, Desiree Fixler, was fired, she says, after raising internal concerns about the firm's annual report, which claimed that more than half the assets managed by the company had gone through a process called "ESG integration." In reality, according to an internal DWS assessment, "only a small fraction of the investment platform" went through any analysis related to ESG ratings. And its actual ESG process was shoddy and inadequate. One example: DWS gave a German payments company called Wirecard a B in ethics the same month it collapsed in a fraud scandal. The "G" in ESG, Fixler noted, is supposed to stand for governance.