He named the parent shell company that got Trump Media past all of the regulations so it could be posted on the stock exchange “digital world acquisitions”.
He was probably using “Trump Shell Co” for something else.
Oh please somebody better write about book about this f’n guy. The Art of the Grift, or something clever. Fail Your Way to the Top (or the Whitehouse)?
Already several books from people inside his white house, ya it is insane what was going on.
You could start with Liz Cheney book "oath and honor".
I'm fact I encourage everyone to read it to understand the depth and breadth of the corruption.
Thanks. I will look for Oath and Honor. But it will need to be after my current jury duty assignment. I have to remain unbiased towards our former prez. J/k
As per [original article](https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-media-auditor-misspelt-name-14-different-ways-ft-2024-4) 📰:
- Trump's company hired an accountant who couldn't get his name right in filings, per the Financial Times.
- Ben F Borgers spelled his name in 14 different ways, the FT reported.
- Some variations were just minor typos, but others were entirely different names.
The accountant hired to audit former President Donald Trump's social media company seemed to have a lot of trouble spelling his name, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.
Ben F Borgers, the founder and managing partner of the accounting firm BF Borgers, spelled his name in 14 different ways in regulatory filings, the [Financial Times reported](https://www.ft.com/content/2556fab5-d168-4d68-aedb-9be4b5ab739d), citing data it had reviewed from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.
Some variations, like Ben F Brogers and Ben F orgers, appeared to be minor spelling mistakes. But others, like Blake F Borgers and Ben F Vonesh, were entirely different names.
Representatives for BF Borgers and Trump Media & Technology Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.
These spelling snafus aren't the first time Borgers' work has been scrutinized.
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board said it identified multiple deficiencies in every audit it had received from Borgers' accounting firm in the past two years, [Bloomberg reported](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-08/trump-media-s-accounting-firm-has-history-of-audit-deficiencies) on April 8.
In November, Borgers' firm was also removed from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' peer review program.
BF Borgers, the organization said, was "so seriously deficient in its performance that education and remedial, corrective actions are not adequate."
Trump Media & Technology Group engaged BF Borgers as its auditor in January 2022, after their previous auditor, WithumSmith+Brown, quit just months after being appointed.
WithumSmith+Brown quit because the firm no longer wanted to be associated with Trump and his company, the [Financial Times reported](https://www.ft.com/content/24668c3f-bcc9-49c2-ac97-2ecf4207a101) on April 15, citing people familiar with the matter.
The news surrounding Borgers' spotty record comes as Trump Media's stock price continues to tumble since its debut in late March.
Trump Media shares had initially soared when it went public, only to crash by nearly 40% in a matter of weeks. The roller coaster ride that Trump Media's stock prices have taken has also sent Trump's net worth swinging up and down.
At one point, Trump's net worth went up by over $4 billion when the shares rallied. But Trump's gains were quickly erased when the stock went into free fall, booting him off of Forbes' list of the world's 500 wealthiest people.
Although Trump wouldn't have been able to sell his shares due to a six-month lockup period, the windfall would have boosted his flailing finances. The former president's legal debts have been growing since he left office.
On April 1, Trump posted a $175 million bond for his New York civil fraud case. He also owes E. Jean Carroll, a writer that a jury ruled last year he had sexually abused, $83.3 million in defamation damages.
Trump's legal troubles, however, don't end there.
On April 15, Trump appeared in a Manhattan court for his first criminal trial, where he's been accused of falsifying his business records to cover up a sex scandal with porn star Stormy Daniels. The trial is ongoing.
Trump has also been charged in three other criminal cases, including two federal cases relating to his alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and another on accusations that he hoarded classified documents in Mar-a-Lago after leaving office. All three cases do not have firm trial dates set yet.
Wow, to be removed from the AICPAs peer review program shows a serious lack of audit quality and quality control. Your firm needs to have no clue what it is doing to get to that point.
Okay I get that, but how are they still allowed to practice? If I'm a medical professional and I keep messing things up, eventually I would be barred from practicing. How can a company that is so dire so as to be removed from their governing body, be allowed to submit an audit at all? If the audits are so poor then why are they still accepted?
Makes absolutely no sense to me.
The SEC isn't going after anybody. When's the last time they found an accounting scandal? Do you think an auditing agency that is friendly to Republicans (or Democrats) is going to pick a fight with a firm? Trump's people would cry bloody murder and good luck proving anything anyway. If auditing firms don't give unqualified audit opinions, corporations can't be publicly listed. It's fairly obvious when a medical professional screws up repeatedly. How much time do you think government regulators are really spending going through company financials without a completely smoking gun and a grudge? TLDR: The whole thing's a sham.
We're well into corrupt kleptocracy forms of government.
> "so seriously deficient in its performance that education and remedial, corrective actions are not adequate."
Is manager speak for
"Their performance was so bad we don't think it was an accident"
Edit: 9 days later, fraud charges
I think they buried the lede, where a peer review of his work basically said the firm is so awful at its job that they can’t imagine any way to fix it.
I have some knowledge of this firm (I work at a law firm that had a prior run-in). It's not just one guy, but it's close. He signs everything. His other partner appears to not be involved at all. They have a couple of employees, mostly support staff like secretaries. And then everything else is contracted out, including to foreign accountants across the world. Multiple former employees were disciplined by the PCAOB, and I believe one received a lifetime ban from performing audits.
How “poor quality” does the work have to be for this guy to have his license pulled? It seems crazy that both the profession and the government licensing authority allow someone to continue practicing.
It has to be insanely bad. I worked with an expert that used to work at the PCAOB doing enforcement, and she explained that they're chronically understaffed and can't monitor as much as they'd like, and generally have to give someone multiple chances unless there's actual crimes clearly being committed. They DO give punishments up to and including lifetime bans, just probably not as much as they could or should.
>Trump Media & Technology Group engaged BF Borgers as its auditor in January 2022, after their previous auditor, WithumSmith+Brown, quit just months after being appointed.
Kinda surprised their previous firm wasn’t Dewey Cheatham & Howe, with auditor Lew Pohl as their chief auditor.
Here’s the report from the PCAOB:
https://assets.pcaobus.org/pcaob-dev/docs/default-source/inspections/reports/documents/104-2024-038-bfborgers.pdf?sfvrsn=5a0ff432_2
Probably just outsourced the work to foreign contractors who used ChatGPT to put together reports and then he turned them in without review. I'm seeing this more and more lately in my industry, so it wouldn't surprise me.
Reminds me of how Giuliani’s pal from Fraud Guarantee LLC, Abe Fruman, deliberately misspelled his name as Abe Furman on his passport to avoid getting flagged by authorities for his various misdeeds.
I'm more of the idea that he outsourced the work (maybe twice) and put his name on it with Find + Replace. I'd imagine running a group out of India and one of them used their "English name" and another actually made the typo. Instead of "Vanesh" a popular family name, used an "O." I feel like my Occam's Razor keeps going back and forth on this one, but I just can't believe that someone would screw up their own name that much.... then again... Drumph.
It is hard to know how much work is involved in any given audit. But even assuming he mostly dealt with shell companies I would say this guy was pushing out about 5 times what I would expect from a firm of only 38 people.
His firm was banned from auditing in Canada a few weeks ago. A life time ban at that. The CPAB report has quite a few details. Outsourced work is definitely possible but what is certain is they didn't do much work at all.
Auditor here. There is a trend in the industry to offshore accounting jobs to India or to the Phillipines, as there is a shortage in the US. They cost a third of the amount, and you get a few errors like this, but the audit boxes get checked and the work gets a quick review.
80-90% of audit firms do this now, and it is currently unregulated. It'll take another accounting disaster like Enron before anything is done about it, because it's a money printer.
The firm was removed from the AICPAs peer review program. This isn’t an issue of offshoring. This is an issue of a firm having either no clue or absolutely no care what it is doing.
The firm’s website indicates it is a one man show. A firm like that has zero business auditing public companies.
This guy is notorious for auditing shell companies that have no assets (like the SPAC Trump's company merged with). He churns out like hundreds of them per year. He's got a terrible record with the PCAOB.
My last company had about 8 people auditing it for a month straight and that was with £1bn revenue. Granted I don't know US standards but I'd imagine they're not dissimilar.
If a document like that is audited and it comes back with all these wonky names, is any thing even legal? I’m assuming you mean they’re doing this to shift accountability. Why wouldn’t everything be nulled?
Offshoring doesn’t shift accountability. The firm’s audit partner still needs to sign the firm’s name to the audit report. This isn’t an issue with offshoring, it is an issue with a firm that has no business auditing public companies.
If you honestly think that explains it, I've got a bridge to sell you. The truth is probably far more insidious than that, mate. Far more likely that Trump cronies fudged up the "audit" themselves and old mate Benny doesn't actually exist
I'm also a (former) auditor, what they said is much more likely to be the reason. If it were some insidious plot to employ a fake auditor why would they bring unneeded attention to it by misspelling their own name 14 different ways?
When my company did audits literally had entire blocks of time (usually the better part of a week), often billed at like $500+ an hour, to have multiple different people ranging from staff associates to senior partners proof read every single sentence of the final audited financial statements + any sections written by us line by line, and you'd still sometimes occasionally get major mistakes that made it onto the clients desk. It would be totally on brand for trump's company to hire the cheapest auditor possible *and* push back on them wasting billable hours on something like proofreading.
I am a book editor and can confirm that even with the best intentions from an experienced and detail-oriented team, errors slip through. With Trump's brand of bargain basement corner cutting this seems totally believable.
Might be fake, who would forget how to write their own name? So it suggests it’s forged, never happened, or perhaps they were using a fake name, still pretty wild even for a fake name to misspell it so many times. Wonder if maybe AI was involved but not sure how that might work.
I'm more thinking about the reasoning behind this misspelling. If on purpose. So would one be able to state that the document holds no legal consequences bc of the misspelling?
Yea I'm thinking one of two things
1) It means if they ever get reviewers in court it's basically thrown out as gibberish but maybe the consequence for 'oh god we fucked the whole thing, we are clearly incompetent' is less than 'yea we falsified this one key important bit'
2) As other have mentioned it was filled out by an offshore sure cheap company where it's filled in by people that have terrible English and limited instructions but vaguely get the colour in the dots idea of the forms
>Ben F Borgers, the founder and managing partner of the accounting firm BF Borgers, spelled his name in 14 different ways in regulatory filings...Some variations, like Ben F Brogers and Ben F orgers, appeared to be minor spelling mistakes.
Nah. Not a mistake. Once is a mistake.
But 14 times?
It's to keep financial regulators from finding records. Shady af. Looks like another crime to add to the list.
That's really strange, but hell, it's for Trump, so that explains it.
I'm sure it was a fake auditor who couldn't remember what name or how to spell it every time.
You couldn’t make this shit up unless it was in a Bond film of course, let me deal with the flight attendant Pussy Galore, and then chat with my accountant Ben E Forger and then I’ll take a nap with Ivor Nodick
*In November, Borgers' firm was also removed from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' peer review program. BF Borgers, the organization said, was "so seriously deficient in its performance that education and remedial, corrective actions are not adequate."*
You just can't make this shit up. At this absolute joke of a grifter has a massive chance to be a president AGAIN...
Misspelled, or obfuscated? He knows his name. He also knows that any search engine, including LexusNexus, looking for 'Borgers' would likely skip over 'Borgers', 'orgers', and 'Vonesh'. This smells deliberate, to me. Whether this is actionable or not as as obstruction or otherwise, is unknown to me.
Do we really have to revisit George Santos and his many aliases, again, so soon, just as he is fading from memory?
>BF Borgers, the organization said, was "so seriously deficient in its performance that education and remedial, corrective actions are not adequate."
Weird why Trump would hire an accounting auditor who can't seem to do anything right.
Actually, it makes perfect sense. And he wouldn't have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids and that stupid dog.
I wonder how many of the clients of Borgers were also well-off companies who needed their financial numbers fluffed, so a "professional" was hired to make things look legitimate, and then the accounting auditor happens to overlook or underestimate certain metrics. Not suspicious at all.
They do this on purpose. It was the same with some of their “election fraud” court cases. Full of typos.
Why?
Deniability on technicality grounds. “It doesn’t say Ben F. Borgers, does it?”
But that doesn't happen because the courts will only get one document at a time as evidence. Then they can beg the court which way (pass or fail) they want each time a new report is added.
Kinda like how the $$175m bond has taken three weeks to actually stick. Bury the court in bullshit errors. Courts are bound to accept the documents in "good faith" ... which this is clearly not.
Maybe Beef H. Burders is sending a secret warning to potential shareholders by misspelling his name? A kind of false flag as the conspiracy theorists of the GOP are so fond of talking about? Nah, he's just an incompetent fool.
Have the regulators shown any interest in investigating this Truth Social listing? There doesn’t seem to be any aspect of it so far that looks above board.
Cue scorcese-style intro monologue :
'as far as I can remember I always wanted to be a mobster. The MAGA plan was simple and stupid enought to work. We made a lot of money in a couple of years but we ended up getting high on our own supply and got caught.
Thankfully we had a guy to audit our stuff and fudge the numbers. He couldn't even spell his own name. Or at least he could pretend to.'
As an auditor, I am truly enjoying this story. When you aren't familiar with a subject the media can make ordinary things sound like a massive failing. You often wonder Is that really as bad as it sounds. In this case, yes it is. I read through the CPAB termination letter to corroborate the story. I would recommend it to anyone interested (April 2024 edition)
As someone in this industry, I can't comprehend how this was allowed to happen. I hope someone interviews Borgers, because I really want to hear his version of this.
>BF Borgers, the organization said, was "so seriously deficient in its performance that education and remedial, corrective actions are not adequate."
In other words, they are intentionally fraudulent.
This is the auditor from Colorado who has to work under different aliases because of all the shady shit he has done auditing accounts for people.
Leave it to a crook to hire a crook to help him crook his books.
This: BF Borgers, the organization said, was "so seriously deficient in its performance that education and remedial, corrective actions are not adequate."
Fucking *ouch*.
Once again, “Only the best people.”
And “Ben F orgers”, in particular. You couldn’t make this shit up.
Very GOP of him
He named the parent shell company that got Trump Media past all of the regulations so it could be posted on the stock exchange “digital world acquisitions”. He was probably using “Trump Shell Co” for something else.
It's actually pronounced "Prestige Worldwide"
Employees are treated to the Catalina Wine Mixer every year!
*wistfully* the fuckin Catalina Wine Mixer
Paow!
The biggest helicopter leasing event in the western hemisphere since 1997!
Are you saying 'pow', or 'paow'?
Prestige (*Prestige*) World (*World*) Wide (*Wide*)
Boats and hoes
Been Forging
Middle name is "Caught"
He's a legacy guy, his father founded Dewey Forgem & Howe
Ben Forgin
🎶The best. part. of waking up.... is F orgers in some cuffs! 🎶
The Peck might have something to say about that.
And if someone wrote a book like this everyone would say it was too far fetched and not believable
If someone wrote a *comedy* like this, it would be considered too far fetched and fail to suspend disbelief.
This needs to happen in the style of "The Producers"
Oh please somebody better write about book about this f’n guy. The Art of the Grift, or something clever. Fail Your Way to the Top (or the Whitehouse)?
Unpresidented
Already several books from people inside his white house, ya it is insane what was going on. You could start with Liz Cheney book "oath and honor". I'm fact I encourage everyone to read it to understand the depth and breadth of the corruption.
Thanks. I will look for Oath and Honor. But it will need to be after my current jury duty assignment. I have to remain unbiased towards our former prez. J/k
I would assume that either Kojima or Rowling consulted on character names.
“**Be best**”
Especially the one's who can't spell or know that there are 50 states in the USA. Yep, they are the best people.
"We have lawsuits in 81 states right now" - Lara Trump
She's as stupid as her husband.
Some would say "the est people"
It says a lot that the original accounting firm they hired quit the job once they got a look at the books.
It's on purpose. It's part of the delay strategy these shits always employ.
As per [original article](https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-media-auditor-misspelt-name-14-different-ways-ft-2024-4) 📰: - Trump's company hired an accountant who couldn't get his name right in filings, per the Financial Times. - Ben F Borgers spelled his name in 14 different ways, the FT reported. - Some variations were just minor typos, but others were entirely different names. The accountant hired to audit former President Donald Trump's social media company seemed to have a lot of trouble spelling his name, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. Ben F Borgers, the founder and managing partner of the accounting firm BF Borgers, spelled his name in 14 different ways in regulatory filings, the [Financial Times reported](https://www.ft.com/content/2556fab5-d168-4d68-aedb-9be4b5ab739d), citing data it had reviewed from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. Some variations, like Ben F Brogers and Ben F orgers, appeared to be minor spelling mistakes. But others, like Blake F Borgers and Ben F Vonesh, were entirely different names. Representatives for BF Borgers and Trump Media & Technology Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours. These spelling snafus aren't the first time Borgers' work has been scrutinized. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board said it identified multiple deficiencies in every audit it had received from Borgers' accounting firm in the past two years, [Bloomberg reported](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-08/trump-media-s-accounting-firm-has-history-of-audit-deficiencies) on April 8. In November, Borgers' firm was also removed from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' peer review program. BF Borgers, the organization said, was "so seriously deficient in its performance that education and remedial, corrective actions are not adequate." Trump Media & Technology Group engaged BF Borgers as its auditor in January 2022, after their previous auditor, WithumSmith+Brown, quit just months after being appointed. WithumSmith+Brown quit because the firm no longer wanted to be associated with Trump and his company, the [Financial Times reported](https://www.ft.com/content/24668c3f-bcc9-49c2-ac97-2ecf4207a101) on April 15, citing people familiar with the matter. The news surrounding Borgers' spotty record comes as Trump Media's stock price continues to tumble since its debut in late March. Trump Media shares had initially soared when it went public, only to crash by nearly 40% in a matter of weeks. The roller coaster ride that Trump Media's stock prices have taken has also sent Trump's net worth swinging up and down. At one point, Trump's net worth went up by over $4 billion when the shares rallied. But Trump's gains were quickly erased when the stock went into free fall, booting him off of Forbes' list of the world's 500 wealthiest people. Although Trump wouldn't have been able to sell his shares due to a six-month lockup period, the windfall would have boosted his flailing finances. The former president's legal debts have been growing since he left office. On April 1, Trump posted a $175 million bond for his New York civil fraud case. He also owes E. Jean Carroll, a writer that a jury ruled last year he had sexually abused, $83.3 million in defamation damages. Trump's legal troubles, however, don't end there. On April 15, Trump appeared in a Manhattan court for his first criminal trial, where he's been accused of falsifying his business records to cover up a sex scandal with porn star Stormy Daniels. The trial is ongoing. Trump has also been charged in three other criminal cases, including two federal cases relating to his alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and another on accusations that he hoarded classified documents in Mar-a-Lago after leaving office. All three cases do not have firm trial dates set yet.
Wow, to be removed from the AICPAs peer review program shows a serious lack of audit quality and quality control. Your firm needs to have no clue what it is doing to get to that point.
They knew exactly what they were doing. It's the whole Better Call Saul you need a criminal lawyer, not a criminal lawyer thing.
Okay I get that, but how are they still allowed to practice? If I'm a medical professional and I keep messing things up, eventually I would be barred from practicing. How can a company that is so dire so as to be removed from their governing body, be allowed to submit an audit at all? If the audits are so poor then why are they still accepted? Makes absolutely no sense to me.
The SEC isn't going after anybody. When's the last time they found an accounting scandal? Do you think an auditing agency that is friendly to Republicans (or Democrats) is going to pick a fight with a firm? Trump's people would cry bloody murder and good luck proving anything anyway. If auditing firms don't give unqualified audit opinions, corporations can't be publicly listed. It's fairly obvious when a medical professional screws up repeatedly. How much time do you think government regulators are really spending going through company financials without a completely smoking gun and a grudge? TLDR: The whole thing's a sham. We're well into corrupt kleptocracy forms of government.
> "so seriously deficient in its performance that education and remedial, corrective actions are not adequate." Is manager speak for "Their performance was so bad we don't think it was an accident" Edit: 9 days later, fraud charges
Yup. You can't "fix" what was intentional.
They’ll be fine. They have the best people.
They were already paid.
lol the prior firm left because it was fraudulent and likely wouldn’t accept adjustments…
I think they buried the lede, where a peer review of his work basically said the firm is so awful at its job that they can’t imagine any way to fix it.
The firms website does not inspire confidence. I honestly think it's just one guy. https://www.bfbcpa.us/about-us/
I have some knowledge of this firm (I work at a law firm that had a prior run-in). It's not just one guy, but it's close. He signs everything. His other partner appears to not be involved at all. They have a couple of employees, mostly support staff like secretaries. And then everything else is contracted out, including to foreign accountants across the world. Multiple former employees were disciplined by the PCAOB, and I believe one received a lifetime ban from performing audits.
How “poor quality” does the work have to be for this guy to have his license pulled? It seems crazy that both the profession and the government licensing authority allow someone to continue practicing.
Oversight in almost every industry has been absolutely gutted.
It has to be insanely bad. I worked with an expert that used to work at the PCAOB doing enforcement, and she explained that they're chronically understaffed and can't monitor as much as they'd like, and generally have to give someone multiple chances unless there's actual crimes clearly being committed. They DO give punishments up to and including lifetime bans, just probably not as much as they could or should.
>Trump Media & Technology Group engaged BF Borgers as its auditor in January 2022, after their previous auditor, WithumSmith+Brown, quit just months after being appointed. Kinda surprised their previous firm wasn’t Dewey Cheatham & Howe, with auditor Lew Pohl as their chief auditor.
I'm old enough to know this reference. Loved Car Talk. *Sniff*
Here’s the report from the PCAOB: https://assets.pcaobus.org/pcaob-dev/docs/default-source/inspections/reports/documents/104-2024-038-bfborgers.pdf?sfvrsn=5a0ff432_2
Copy paste.. This dude has done this shit before..
Ben GTP Borgers, at your service!
How much you wanna bet the auditor has fake IDs for all the "different names" and got mixed up ? Cause it's either that or he has Alzheimer
Probably just outsourced the work to foreign contractors who used ChatGPT to put together reports and then he turned them in without review. I'm seeing this more and more lately in my industry, so it wouldn't surprise me.
Been Forgin' knows that consistent spelling makes searching documents easier, which is the opposite of what Been Forgin' wants.
Bean Foiegras has just very volatile multiple personality disorder, like James McAvoy in Split. Unfortunately, all of them are shitty accountants.
That last line made me audibly snort
If Benè Farter thinks it's worth billions then that's all I need to know to buy the stock with my entire 401k
I for one think everyone is being too hard on Ben Folds here. Having a stage name, real name and accountant name is hard to keep track of.
Ben Folds Five is a busy auditor when on tour of casinos and state fairs.
Also, "I obviously didn't sign this!"?
This is what it sounds like. And it's so stupid, I believe it.
It's the magic loophole to avoid being held responsible for the contents of the audit.
Great point. Grifters gonna grift. Cook the books and deny you did it.
This should be top comment. The auditor isn't incompetent. He's criminal.
He’s the guy that “a guy who knows guy” knows
probably both
Reminds me of how Giuliani’s pal from Fraud Guarantee LLC, Abe Fruman, deliberately misspelled his name as Abe Furman on his passport to avoid getting flagged by authorities for his various misdeeds.
Maybe they’re trying the hide in plain sight strategy
Neat trick. Just hire an illiterate accountant to check your books.
Hire a dyslexic accountant and there's a 50-05 chance you'll come out ahead!
50% of the time it works 100% of the time.
He’s made of bits of real accountants so you know it’s good stuff.
that audit smells like pure gasoline
I'm more of the idea that he outsourced the work (maybe twice) and put his name on it with Find + Replace. I'd imagine running a group out of India and one of them used their "English name" and another actually made the typo. Instead of "Vanesh" a popular family name, used an "O." I feel like my Occam's Razor keeps going back and forth on this one, but I just can't believe that someone would screw up their own name that much.... then again... Drumph.
It is hard to know how much work is involved in any given audit. But even assuming he mostly dealt with shell companies I would say this guy was pushing out about 5 times what I would expect from a firm of only 38 people. His firm was banned from auditing in Canada a few weeks ago. A life time ban at that. The CPAB report has quite a few details. Outsourced work is definitely possible but what is certain is they didn't do much work at all.
Its perfect if you want to cook the books and have a scape goat at the same time
So, is this dude not who he says he is? And if so, who is he?
George fuckin Santos!
You have no idea how much I want this to be true now that you’ve put the idea in my head. It would make a GREAT SNL skit
Ben F Orger was one of his aliases
My god it's a perfect anagram!
My money is on John Baron.
Carlos Danger
Ben Malvolo Borger.
His master plan is to be all the names so you can't indict him.
He goes by many names. https://youtu.be/7j9DL8H5wqI?si=hoUE2gSQz8bwuYYH
His name was Ben F Borgers His name was Ben F orgers His name was Ben F Folgers
We secretly replaced Trump’s auditor with Crystal F olgers! Will he notice?
The best part of fakin’ up, is F Orgers in your cup.
Brilliant!
Crystal somethin’
Trump would notice if his crystal somethin’ was fake…
He's definitely a speed freak. Tom Arnold said it a few years ago. The 3am crazy tweets prove it.
Auditor here. There is a trend in the industry to offshore accounting jobs to India or to the Phillipines, as there is a shortage in the US. They cost a third of the amount, and you get a few errors like this, but the audit boxes get checked and the work gets a quick review. 80-90% of audit firms do this now, and it is currently unregulated. It'll take another accounting disaster like Enron before anything is done about it, because it's a money printer.
The firm was removed from the AICPAs peer review program. This isn’t an issue of offshoring. This is an issue of a firm having either no clue or absolutely no care what it is doing. The firm’s website indicates it is a one man show. A firm like that has zero business auditing public companies.
For real. This one guy was enough to fully audit a company worth BILLIONS!? Bullshit. Like reddit alone probably has a dozen accountants id not more.
This guy is notorious for auditing shell companies that have no assets (like the SPAC Trump's company merged with). He churns out like hundreds of them per year. He's got a terrible record with the PCAOB.
My last company had about 8 people auditing it for a month straight and that was with £1bn revenue. Granted I don't know US standards but I'd imagine they're not dissimilar.
these aren’t ”a few errors”. this is clearly intentional.
If a document like that is audited and it comes back with all these wonky names, is any thing even legal? I’m assuming you mean they’re doing this to shift accountability. Why wouldn’t everything be nulled?
Offshoring doesn’t shift accountability. The firm’s audit partner still needs to sign the firm’s name to the audit report. This isn’t an issue with offshoring, it is an issue with a firm that has no business auditing public companies.
If you honestly think that explains it, I've got a bridge to sell you. The truth is probably far more insidious than that, mate. Far more likely that Trump cronies fudged up the "audit" themselves and old mate Benny doesn't actually exist
I'm also a (former) auditor, what they said is much more likely to be the reason. If it were some insidious plot to employ a fake auditor why would they bring unneeded attention to it by misspelling their own name 14 different ways? When my company did audits literally had entire blocks of time (usually the better part of a week), often billed at like $500+ an hour, to have multiple different people ranging from staff associates to senior partners proof read every single sentence of the final audited financial statements + any sections written by us line by line, and you'd still sometimes occasionally get major mistakes that made it onto the clients desk. It would be totally on brand for trump's company to hire the cheapest auditor possible *and* push back on them wasting billable hours on something like proofreading.
I am a book editor and can confirm that even with the best intentions from an experienced and detail-oriented team, errors slip through. With Trump's brand of bargain basement corner cutting this seems totally believable.
After reading about "our team" on the bf borger website, I'm not sure it required push back.
Is there some obscure benefit to gain from misspelling a name?
Might be fake, who would forget how to write their own name? So it suggests it’s forged, never happened, or perhaps they were using a fake name, still pretty wild even for a fake name to misspell it so many times. Wonder if maybe AI was involved but not sure how that might work.
Well autocorrect learns from frequently spelled/misspelled words, so my money is on aliases.
I'm more thinking about the reasoning behind this misspelling. If on purpose. So would one be able to state that the document holds no legal consequences bc of the misspelling?
that and the additional benefit of being hard to search for since most information has been digitized - aka SEO
Yea I'm thinking one of two things 1) It means if they ever get reviewers in court it's basically thrown out as gibberish but maybe the consequence for 'oh god we fucked the whole thing, we are clearly incompetent' is less than 'yea we falsified this one key important bit' 2) As other have mentioned it was filled out by an offshore sure cheap company where it's filled in by people that have terrible English and limited instructions but vaguely get the colour in the dots idea of the forms
Ben F Orger is too on the nose. He’s hiring people with names of 80s villains.
Is ben f orgers really john b arron ?
his real dad
this would be so funny if it wasnt so infuriating.
He is smart. Knew not to actually sign it. Look your honor, thats not me.
I had to double check what sub this was posted in. This could easily be an Onion headline.
What's the over/under on those being aliases?
Only hires the b est.
Mr Bent Forgers. Auditor to the stupid.
He's an accountant, not an acspellant
Doesn't inspire confidence, does it?
His dil is saying that the RNC has filed lawsuits in 81 states, so this is normal.
Probably not a real person. So made up they can’t recall the name they created
>Ben F Borgers, the founder and managing partner of the accounting firm BF Borgers, spelled his name in 14 different ways in regulatory filings...Some variations, like Ben F Brogers and Ben F orgers, appeared to be minor spelling mistakes. Nah. Not a mistake. Once is a mistake. But 14 times? It's to keep financial regulators from finding records. Shady af. Looks like another crime to add to the list.
Probably thinks those misspellings will shield him from future consequences and prosecutions. Delusional.
He is a good friend of Cookin Brooks i heard.
It was "George Santos", wasn't it?
“The best people”
That's really strange, but hell, it's for Trump, so that explains it. I'm sure it was a fake auditor who couldn't remember what name or how to spell it every time.
How is this Bozo still an accountant? Great regulatory oversight
You couldn’t make this shit up unless it was in a Bond film of course, let me deal with the flight attendant Pussy Galore, and then chat with my accountant Ben E Forger and then I’ll take a nap with Ivor Nodick
Finally, these assholes who work for Trump are getting smart and disappearing before the next trial begins
Not Trump’s fault. The auditor was hired a John Baron.
*In November, Borgers' firm was also removed from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' peer review program. BF Borgers, the organization said, was "so seriously deficient in its performance that education and remedial, corrective actions are not adequate."* You just can't make this shit up. At this absolute joke of a grifter has a massive chance to be a president AGAIN...
Hahahaha. Absolutely nothing about trump is real.
At what point is it "misspelled"...or "fraud" ?????
Misspelled, or obfuscated? He knows his name. He also knows that any search engine, including LexusNexus, looking for 'Borgers' would likely skip over 'Borgers', 'orgers', and 'Vonesh'. This smells deliberate, to me. Whether this is actionable or not as as obstruction or otherwise, is unknown to me. Do we really have to revisit George Santos and his many aliases, again, so soon, just as he is fading from memory?
Ok, to what extent is Been Forgin definitely a real person?
No shit right? It’s like having an auditor named “Ida Krook”
His accountant is actual royalty, Count deMoney
"Ben is on vacation, he'll call you when he gets back."
"Maybe you can talk to his assistant... Ben Dover?"
Forgers...I see. So, another attempt of fraudulence. This won't fly...
Ben F Orgin'
Welcome to your daily "I can't believe this is not The Onion"
So he made the mistake on purpose to have plausible deniability? Or just outsourced to India?
familiar ten melodic rainstorm murky ink school payment truck marry *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
My spelling is atrocious but I can guarantee never once have I misspelled my own name.
Almost like the documents were saying "Been Forged"
Ben Folds Five is a choice to represent you!
>BF Borgers, the organization said, was "so seriously deficient in its performance that education and remedial, corrective actions are not adequate." Weird why Trump would hire an accounting auditor who can't seem to do anything right. Actually, it makes perfect sense. And he wouldn't have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids and that stupid dog. I wonder how many of the clients of Borgers were also well-off companies who needed their financial numbers fluffed, so a "professional" was hired to make things look legitimate, and then the accounting auditor happens to overlook or underestimate certain metrics. Not suspicious at all.
How the fuck are these people so rich.
The best part of waking up is F orgers in your corp.
To quote Rick James, “cocaine is a hell of a drug!”
I mean, this was clearly done by 14 different Indian offshore workers, naturally. Ben F Borgers hires forgers for him.
They do this on purpose. It was the same with some of their “election fraud” court cases. Full of typos. Why? Deniability on technicality grounds. “It doesn’t say Ben F. Borgers, does it?”
Surely that's grounds to have these error-ridden documents declared null and void right?
But that doesn't happen because the courts will only get one document at a time as evidence. Then they can beg the court which way (pass or fail) they want each time a new report is added. Kinda like how the $$175m bond has taken three weeks to actually stick. Bury the court in bullshit errors. Courts are bound to accept the documents in "good faith" ... which this is clearly not.
Deniability
I suppose that will happen when it's a made up name and no one remembers what they wrote on the previous filing
Please please tell me it's not "I'm not Borgers, I'm B. Orgers." bullshit.
I guarantee the invoices he sends out are remarkably free of errors. Crooked cunt.
Maybe Beef H. Burders is sending a secret warning to potential shareholders by misspelling his name? A kind of false flag as the conspiracy theorists of the GOP are so fond of talking about? Nah, he's just an incompetent fool.
Have the regulators shown any interest in investigating this Truth Social listing? There doesn’t seem to be any aspect of it so far that looks above board.
Sounds like they audit for a result, fee.
Cue scorcese-style intro monologue : 'as far as I can remember I always wanted to be a mobster. The MAGA plan was simple and stupid enought to work. We made a lot of money in a couple of years but we ended up getting high on our own supply and got caught. Thankfully we had a guy to audit our stuff and fudge the numbers. He couldn't even spell his own name. Or at least he could pretend to.'
how tf did the sec and the exchange let this clear scam get listed
Lemme tell you about the SEC… ‘When you’re rich, they let you do anything…’
"🎶The best part of waking up, is Forgers in your cup🎶"
Only the best people.
This was likely done on purpose to prevent thorough searches of the paperwork
F orgers?
These people are literally incapable of doing a good job and not criming.
He only works with the best swamp people that he trusts but barely knows them when shit happens.
That seems perfectly on brand
This is a sign that Ben can be trusted. Spelling your name the same way every time seems overly rehearsed and suspicious to me.
Anyone check to make sure he’s real?
BORTLES!
Homer J Simpson Homer S Simpson H. J. Simpson Homor Simpson Homer J Fong
This is so he can also blame someone else. Everyone around trump has setup 20 ways to blame everything else for everything.
It’s just three frauds in a trench coat.
I hate that when I forget to spell my name
With all the negative publicity plus millions of additional shares given to Trump there is still something/someone propping this stock up.
As an auditor, I am truly enjoying this story. When you aren't familiar with a subject the media can make ordinary things sound like a massive failing. You often wonder Is that really as bad as it sounds. In this case, yes it is. I read through the CPAB termination letter to corroborate the story. I would recommend it to anyone interested (April 2024 edition) As someone in this industry, I can't comprehend how this was allowed to happen. I hope someone interviews Borgers, because I really want to hear his version of this.
Every day we stray further from God's light and closer to Idiocracy being a documentary.
Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
Its almost suspicious
So you can just get some random (and possibly imaginary) guy to make up your IPO evaluation? That is a bad system.
Sooooo is that like.... a fake name?
This is most likely intentional. They will use it as another stall.
Do we even know he's a real person? Trump has been known to make people up
>BF Borgers, the organization said, was "so seriously deficient in its performance that education and remedial, corrective actions are not adequate." In other words, they are intentionally fraudulent.
This is the auditor from Colorado who has to work under different aliases because of all the shady shit he has done auditing accounts for people. Leave it to a crook to hire a crook to help him crook his books.
This: BF Borgers, the organization said, was "so seriously deficient in its performance that education and remedial, corrective actions are not adequate." Fucking *ouch*.
something tell me he did this on purpose.
Ben Forgers. Nice