The longtime accounting firm for Donald Trump has cut ties with him and his business organization, saying that it can no longer stand behind a decade of annual financial statements it prepared for the Trump Organization.
The decision was disclosed to the Trump Organization at the end of last week in a letter from the accounting firm, Mazars USA.
Mazars instructed the Trump Organization to retract a decade of financial statements based on information that Trump and his company provided.
Mazars revoking its financial statements comes amid criminal and civil investigations into whether Trump illegally inflated the value of his assets. Mazars’ statements are at the center of the two law enforcement investigations.
The accounting firm’s acknowledgment that the statements are fundamentally flawed could be a huge blow to Trump and his organization as it attempts to block the longtime scrutiny of its finances. Not to mention that Trump’s personal finances are massively intertwined with the finances of his businesses, and has faced questions for a long time over his taxes.
The letter essentially retracts the documents from 2011 to 2020. Mazars said that the firm had not yet as a whole found material discrepancies, but given the totality of the circumstances, including the accounting firm’s own investigation, the organization needs to notify anyone who received the statements that they cannot be relied upon.
It makes Mazars the latest in a long line of companies to break their ties with Trump and his businesses over the past year alone. Several banks, insurers, and lawyers did the same over the last year.
Mazars first attempted to split from Trump last spring and wound down its work for the organization during a transition to a new accounting firm. But this letter represents a much sharper break.
It is expected that the letter from Mazars could bolster ongoing investigations, which had focused partly on the statements and whether they helped to overvalue Trump’s businesses and properties.
Be the first to comment