Former United States President Donald Trump's business, the Trump Organization, is facing another hurdle after its accounting firm said last week that it could no longer vouch for the reliability of decade-old financial statements of the company.
In a letter sent to the Trump Organization chief legal officer, Mazars, an international audit, tax, and advisory firm, said they will no longer be the company's accountants, citing a conflict of interest. They said the decision was made in part due to the filings made by the New York Attorney General on Jan. 18, 2022.
Trump Org's Financial Statements
Mazars said that it was not concluding that all of the financial documents of the Trump Organization contained material discrepancies. However, the accounting firm said it was appropriate to no longer rely on those financial statements and not give advice to the former president's business.
Furthermore, the accounting firm also urged the Trump Organization to inform any recipients of the financial statements, including lenders or insurers, to not rely on the documents. On Monday, Mazars said the only work that was not finished was filing Trump and Melania Trump's tax returns, as per CNN.
The accounting firm's decision to cut ties with the Trump Organization could have severe consequences both for Trump's financial future and the legal probes that he and his family's business are now facing. Trump Organization spokesperson Kimberly Benza released a statement saying that the former president's company was "disappointed that Mazars has chosen to part ways."
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The Republican businessman has long accused New York Attorney General Letitia James of running a politically-motivated investigation into his business. However, the attorney general responded with a statement released on Monday, saying that there was evidence against the former president and his organization.
According to NPR, James accused the former president and his organization of using fraudulent and misleading financial statements to obtain economic benefit. The controversy with Mazars comes more than seven months after then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. charged the former president's company and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, in 2021 for crimes related to an alleged tax fraud scheme.
Fraudulent Deals
Former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Lynn Turner, said that Mazars laid out details that were far from common in the accounting industry. He argued that getting such a letter from an accounting firm was a highly unusual case. Turner noted that it meant something significant within the contents of the financial statements that needed to be revised.
In a statement on Monday, another Trump Organization spokesperson said that the separation with Mazars was good news for the former president's company and bad news for James' civil probe. They said that despite several investigations, Mazars found no material discrepancies within the Trump Organization's financial statements.
The spokesperson said that the incident effectively rendered the investigations by the former District Attorney and Attorney General moot. James has been engaged in a yearslong investigation of the Trump Organization to show that the Republican businessman's company was fraudulently filing statements, NBC News reported.
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