Why the accounting firm has parted ways with its longtime client and his company.
Being fired by your accounting firm is never a good thing. When the accounting firm not only walks away from you but does so loudly with an express warning to users of your financial information that they can no longer rely on its accuracy, that’s even worse.
In a truly comical display of Trumpian dishonesty, the Trump Organization pretended that this potentially calamitous development is something positive. A statement from the Trump Organization seized upon a single sentence in the Mazars letter to put forth the preposterous claim that a letter brutally disavowing the accuracy of Trump’s financial statement was actually good news
The Mazars February 9 letter is just the tip of the iceberg. The New York Times has reported that Mazars has been cooperating with the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal investigation, and that Trump’s main accountant at Mazars has already testified before a grand jury. No prosecutor or grand jury will unquestioningly accept vagaries like “taken as a whole.” Mazars will have to explain in detail what it discovered, how the new information differed from what the Trump Organization represented at the time the statements were prepared, and exactly why it decided to fire Trump as a client and warn investors not to rely on the Trump Organization’s statements.
This is a big deal. It means that Mazars has flipped and is now protecting itself, not Trump. (Or, as Trump put it in his statement last night, that Mazars didn’t feel it could “fight it out.”) That is undoubtedly the “non-waivable conflict of interest with the Trump organization” referred to in Mazars’s February 9 letter.
But Mazars just made it more difficult for Trump to conduct his business and tightened the noose in New York.