Mazars noisily fires Trump

The accounting firm said it now believes a decade worth of his financial statements are unreliable - February 14, 2022

Former President Trump’s long time accounting firm, Mazars, has effectively ditched him and his real estate company, according to a letter sent to Trump’s general counsel Alan Garten last week and filed by the New York Attorney General' in state court on Monday.

The accounting firm informed Garten that it had concluded a decade worth of Trump’s past financial statements, for the years 2011 to 2020, are unreliable. Mazars instructed Garten to inform anyone who had received the statements of its position. The firm had previously compiled these financial statements on Trump’s behalf, some of which, in addition to being given to lenders and investors to Trump’s business ventures, were offered to the public as part of his presidential campaign.

Mazars was prompted to change its view, the letter said, in part based on the NYAG’s detailed filings outlining Trump’s deceptive business practices earlier this year and its own independent reinvestigation. Mazars said that its review had shown its own work to have been “performed … in accordance with professional standards.”

The determination by Mazars that Trump’s financial statements over a full decade are not reliable through no fault of its own amounts to a declaration that it has been repeatedly misled by its client. (Readers can come to their own conclusions about how credible it is for Mazars to purport to have only now discovered Trump’s pattern of deception and whether this might amount to a more knowing collaborator belatedly seeking distance from the scheme.)

The accounting firm also said it had concluded that its new position casting doubt on the financial statements created a conflict of interest between it and the Trump Organization that could not be waived, and therefore it could do no new work on Trump’s behalf.

Underlining the precipitousness of that decision, Mazars informed Garten that it wouldn’t be able to complete some tax returns on behalf of the former president and his wife that are due tomorrow. According to the date on the letter, February 9, it only gave the Trumps six days to find substitute accountants to finish the job on time.

Mazars chalked up the delay in preparing these returns, however, to some unspecified information about what it called “the Matt Calimari Jr. apartment” that it had been asking for over a period of months and had never received. The Trump Org’s security chief is Matthew Calimari, and he and his son reportedly oversee the vast surveillance apparatus at the former president’s commercial properties.

Read the full letter below.