Enough said about who’s defrauding who. Maybe Congress can help them out with an appeal to the Republican chairs /s…
The Securities and Exchange Commission accused the auditor of Donald Trump’s social-media company of a “massive fraud” affecting more than 1,500 filings.
BF Borgers CPA PC and its founder Benjamin Borgers will be permanently suspended from appearing as accountants before the SEC, and will pay a total of $14 million in fines to settle the probe, the SEC said in a Friday release.
“Ben Borgers and his audit firm, BF Borgers, were responsible for one of the largest wholesale failures by gatekeepers in our financial markets,” Gurbir Grewal, the SEC’s enforcement chief, said in a statement.
BF Borgers did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday morning. The firm has been one of the most prolific auditors in the US. The most recent review of its audits by US regulators found a 100% deficiency rate.
news.bloomberglaw.com/...
More from CNBC:
The agency, calling BF Borgers a “sham audit mill,” said the company and its owner “deliberately systematically failed to conduct” in accordance with Public Company Accounting Oversight Board standards audits and quarterly reviews incorporated in more than 1,500 SEC filings from January 2021 through June 2023.
The SEC said the Lakewood, Colorado-based auditor lied to clients by saying its work complied with PCAOB standards, fabricated audit documents to make it seem that the work did comply with those standards, and falsely claims in audit reports included in more than 500 public company SEC filings that the firm’s audits complied with such standards.
BF Borgers during the period covered by the SEC complaint acted as the auditor for Trump Media, which was then privately held and moving toward a planned merger with the publicly traded shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp.
Trump Media and DWAC finalized that merger in late March 2024, leading to Trump Media becoming publicly traded under the DJT ticker.
Three days after the company went public, Trump Media’s board approved keeping BF Borgers on as the company’s auditors for 2024.
www.cnbc.com/...