Former President Donald Trump’s longtime accounting firm recently informed the Trump Organization that 10 years worth of Trump’s statements on his financial worth “should no longer be relied upon.”
The determination comes after New York Attorney General Tish James’ office said last month that these “Statements of Financial Condition” repeatedly “misstated objective facts” including the size of his Trump Tower penthouse; overstated his liquidity ; deviated from general accounting principles to reach property valuations; “failed to use fundamental techniques of valuation”; and did not disclose that some of those valuations were artificially inflated to help Trump’s brand.
Mazars said that it reached its conclusion based on James’ revelations, its own internal investigation into the matter, and information it received from “internal and external sources.”
“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,” the firm said in its letter to the Trump Organization.
Mazars went on to say that because of its decision regarding Trump’s statements as well as “the totality of the circumstances,” it will no longer be able to “provide any new work product to the Trump Organization.”
It also advised the company to “inform any recipients thereof who are currently relying upon one or more of those documents that those documents should not be relied upon.”
Insider has reached out to the company for comment.
The Trump Organization is the focus of multiple civil and criminal investigations into if the company inflated or deflated the value of its assets for loan and tax purposes, respectively.
James’ office is conducting a wide-ranging civil investigation looking into whether rampant fraud “permeated the Trump Organization” and wants several members of the Trump family, including the former president and his two eldest children, to sit for depositions.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office, meanwhile, is conducting a criminal investigation into the company and last year brought 15 felony counts against the Trump Organization and its longtime CFO Allen Weisselberg, including including tax fraud, grand larceny, and conspiracy.
In addition to its own civil inquiry, James’ office is also collaborating with the DA’s office on the criminal probe, which has since shifted from a tax-related focus to scrutinizing how the Trump Organization valued its assets.
Last month, the Trump Organization responded to James’ subpoena by accusing the attorney general of being “in violation of every conceivable ethical rule” by investigating him for political reasons.
Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, also accused James of “ethical misconduct” and called her investigation “PR move to revive a political career after your gubernatorial disaster.”
There is no evidence James has run afoul of stat ethics laws, and like the rest of the Democratic field in 2018’s New York attorney general’s race, she campaigned on prosecuting Trump.
James dropped out of the New York governor’s race in December last year, where she had been campaigning on her complicated record of taking on Trump.