By Emmanuel Nduka
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US has shut down BF Borgers, the auditor of Donald Trump’s social media company, accusing it of “massive fraud”.
The SEC charged the firm its founder, Ben Borgers, on Friday with falsely representing to clients that its audit work would comply with US standards, and fabricating documentation.
According to the charges, the firm which is one of the most prolific auditors of US public companies, was responsible for “one of the largest wholesale failures by gatekeepers in our financial markets”.
Without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings, the firm has agreed to pay a $12mn penalty and Ben Borgers to pay $2mn. Ben Borgers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Borgers has expanded rapidly to become auditor to hundreds of small and microcap companies — including the former US president’s Trump Media & Technology Group — but the SEC said that three-quarters of its audits were faulty.
The agency said it was stepping in to permanently close what it called a “massive fraud” and “sham audit mill”, and it told Borgers’ clients they would need to check past financial statements in case they contained errors. The firm’s “deliberate and systemic failure” to meet professional standards affected more than 1,500 company filings, the SEC said.
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The built the eighth-largest client list of any US audit firm in just 15 years while still operating out of a single-storey building in a suburb of Denver, Colorado. Its latest regulatory filing showed it had just 50 staff, 10 of whom are certified public accountants. Ben Borgers himself signed off on more than 140 audit opinions in the past year, according to Ideagen Audit Analytics — far more than any other accountant in the US.
In the past, regulators have been raising increasingly loud warnings about the quality of his work.
Borgers was found to have a 100 per cent deficiency rate in audits inspected by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the Colorado state board of accountancy fined him $5,000 earlier this year for bad audits of retirement plans and Canada’s audit regulator barred BF Borgers from operating in that country last year.
The SEC’s order barring the firm from public auditing leaves more than 170 US public companies searching for new accountants, an issue that appeared to hit some share prices on Friday morning. TMTG was down 4 per cent in early trading.
“Trump Media looks forward to working with new auditing partners in accordance with today’s SEC order,” the company said.
