Taint of "Sham Audit Mill" Makes it Difficult for BF Borgers' Clients to Find New Auditors

Trump Media Auditor’s End Puts Corporate Clients in Market Void

The forced shutdown of BF Borgers CPA PC—the second-biggest auditor of companies traded over-the-counter—has left hundreds of small companies scrambling to find new firms to vet their books.

The firm’s biggest client, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., quickly rebounded with a new auditor. But for many of the rest, the search will be daunting for one big reason: their financial statements are tainted by association with what regulators labeled a “sham audit mill.”“

At the end of the day, those audit opinions cannot be relied on, period,” said Kecia Williams Smith, associate accounting professor at North Carolina …

Binance Pledged to Thwart Suspicious Trading—Until It Involved a Lamborghini-Loving High Roller

When the U.S. accused Binance last year of maximizing profits over protecting users, the company promised “unceasing efforts to deliver a safe and trusted platform.”

This was put to the test soon after when an internal investigation found a top client—a firm run by a Lamborghini-loving crypto trader—was manipulating markets.

The result: Binance kept the client and fired its investigator.

FTX Found the Money

That is not the whole story: FTX has also recovered money by selling off businesses, by selling some of its venture capital portfolio, by seizing real estate and Robinhood Markets Inc. stock that Bankman-Fried and other had bought, by clawing back donations and investments. But the basic form of “FTX made long-term investments with customer money, which was stupid, and those investments lost value and customers demanded their money back, so FTX went bankrupt and just went into hibernation for a year, after which those investments paid off enough to pay back the customers” seems essentially correct.

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But more broadly, [Bankman-Fried] argued from the moment FTX collapsed that it had a liquidity problem, not a solvency problem, that there was enough money there to pay back all the customers, if they would just give him another week or two to work things out. They didn’t. But John Ray had another 18 months to find the money, and he did.

The Missing “T” in ESG

In a recent paper, we argue that amidst the enthusiasm about ESG, a critical parameter has gone virtually unnoticed: corporate tax behavior. The payment of corporate taxes is a powerful indicator of how a company views its role in society and supports the communities in which it operates and the stakeholders with whom it engages. Corporate taxes are fundamental to the provision of public goods. They can fuel vital government initiatives, including sustainable governmental initiatives that benefit society, such as environmentally friendly projects, education, welfare, etc.

One would therefore expect corporate tax behavior, particularly the payment of corporate taxes, to be a crucial component within the ESG framework. Reality, however, is a far cry from this ideal. Focusing on the three dominant market actors in the ESG landscape—ESG rating agencies, institutional investors, and public corporations—we identify a glaring gap between the ESG ratings of corporations and their payment of corporate taxes.