Trump Media's accountant may not actually verify its accounts and accounting, and that may be true for many smaller publicly traded companies. One accountant is signing over 140 audits a year. One of their audit directors is banned in the US, and the whole firm is banned in Canada. Highlights from Bloomberg:
Donald Trump’s social-media company just became the most valuable publicly traded client of an accounting firm that has more experience auditing companies traded over-the-counter and has had a string of regulatory issues, including a 100% deficiency rate on audits reviewed by a US watchdog. …
A Canadian regulator said last year that BF Borgers violated its rules for auditors, while the US’s Public Company Accounting Oversight Board found multiple deficiencies in every audit it reviewed from the firm over the past two annual checks. …
the December enforcement action from Canada’s audit regulator prevents it from accepting new clients in that country until it makes certain improvements. …
The PCAOB said that BF Borgers more than doubled its clients between 2019 and 2021. But the company didn’t add more staff to handle the additional workload, the PCAOB said in an expanded inspection report, noting that just one person was responsible for 147 audits. …
The Washington-based audit regulator found problems with the firm’s testing procedures for bedrock measures such as revenue and accounts receivable, among other issues.
In 2022, the PCAOB placed a two-year ban on one of BF Borgers’ audit directors for failures …
And from the Financial Times:
The firm has targeted small- and microcap companies unable or unwilling to pay the higher rates charged by larger rivals, and appears to have kept its fees low by piling work on to its founder in particular. Ben Borgers is now the most prolific individual auditor of US public companies, personally signing 143 public company audit opinions in the past year, according to the research firm Ideagen Audit Analytics, five times more than any other US accountant. …
BF Borgers’ inspection record is among the worst of the hundreds of audit firms overseen by the PCAOB, showing a 100 per cent deficiency rate in each of the past two years. Examiners found flaws in 21 of the 21 audits they sampled, including failures to properly check accounts and to test accounting policies.
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