U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden said they were "disappointed" by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's (PCAOB) failure to hold auditors accountable for "bogus" crypto audits.
In their latest letter yesterday to PCAOB Chair Erica Williams, Warren and Wyden singled out their concerns about the role of “perverse audits in providing crypto firms with a cloak of security and financial stability.” In January, two Democratic senators first contacted the PCAOB, a nonprofit that oversees audits of public companies and SEC-registered brokers and dealers, noting that PCAOB-registered firms Prager Metis and Armanino had limited auditing of bankrupt cryptocurrencies. Audit of exchange FTX prior to crash.
“Given the continued use of fake audits of crypto companies by PCAOB-registered auditors to mislead the public and threaten the integrity of the auditing system which, we now know, could affect the banking and financial systems you have both the power and the responsibility to control them, ’ wrote yesterday’s letter.
Other audit firms mentioned in Warren and Wyden’s January letter include Mazars Group and Marcum, which verified so-called “proof of reserves” reports from several cryptocurrency exchanges.
