Accounting firm to Trump 'You're fired'

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The accounting firm that prepared former President Donald Trump’s annual financial statements says the documents, used to secure lucrative loans and burnish Trump’s image as a wealthy businessman, “should no longer be relied upon” after New York’s attorney general said they regularly misstated the value of assets.

In a letter to the Trump Organization’s lawyer Feb. 9, Mazars USA LLP advised the company to inform anyone who had gotten the documents not to use them when assessing the financial health of the company and the former president. The firm also said it was cutting ties with Trump.

Mazars’ letter, made public in a court filing Monday, came just weeks after New York Attorney General Letitia James said her investigators uncovered evidence that Trump and his company used “fraudulent or misleading” valuations of its golf clubs, skyscrapers and other properties to get loans and tax benefits.

“While we have not concluded that the various financial statements, as a whole, contain material discrepancies, based upon the totality of the circumstances, we believe our advice to you to no longer rely upon those financial statements is appropriate,” Mazars General Counsel William J. Kelly wrote to his Trump Organization counterpart, Alan Garten.

Kelly said Mazars performed its work on Trump’s financial statements “in accordance with professional standards” but that it could no longer stand by the documents in light of James’ findings and its own investigation.

Mazars’ conclusions applied to Trump’s financial statements for 2011 to 2020, Kelly said. Another accounting firm handled Trump’s 2021 financial statement, according to court filings.

Kelly also informed Garten that Mazars could no longer work with Trump because of a conflict of interest and urged him to find another tax preparer, distancing the firm from its highest-profile client and work that’s at the heart of the civil and criminal investigations.

The Trump Organization said in a statement it was “disappointed that Mazars has chosen to part ways,” but took Kelly’s letter as a positive — noting that the firm hadn’t found material discrepancies in Trump’s financial statements.

In a court filing last month, James’ office detailed several instances in which Trump misstated the value of assets on financial statements given to banks.

Deutsche Bank accepted Trump’s financial statements without objection in a deal for $300 million in loans for three of his properties and, in internal memoranda, emphasized Trump’s reported financial strength as a factor in lending to him, James’ office said.

Another bank said it received financial statements in 2014 stating Trump had a net worth of $5.8 billion and liquidity of $302 million. A bank official involved in that deal told James’ office that if he were aware of misstatements on Trump’s statement of financial condition, he would have killed the deal.