Buy The Dip: Trump Media's auditor, Jane Street and non-car Tesla

A little ray of light from Lakewood

After seven months of snow (!) spring has finally arrived in Norway. In fact it’s been almost summery over the last few days. But little has lightened my mood as much as Ben Borgers, very briefly the auditor of Trump Media & Technology Group, and truly an accountant for our age.

The FT noted a month ago that Borgers had an amazingly prolific auditing business that had been pretty harshly criticised by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. FT Alphaville followed up by noting how he even seemed to struggle to get his name right on auditing statements, spelling it ten different ways, including Ben F Brogers, Blake F Borgers, Ben F Vonesh and – most hilariously for an auditor – Ben F orgers. Really.

There were other clues that something was amiss. Here is what BF Borgers’ website looks like:

And this is what its headquarters in Lakewood, Colorado looks like:

It went about as well as you might expect.

The whole SEC order is worth reading, but my colleagues had a read and picked out some highlights, like:

16. Borgers instructed BF Borgers audit staff and contractors to copy workpapers from previous engagements as the final workpapers for new engagements. Specifically, audit staff updated the balance sheet date and date of completion on the workpapers, but all of the other information indicating the substantive work done on the engagement was simply copied from the corresponding workpaper from the previous audit or quarterly review

17. For example, each engagement had a workpaper called “Engagement Team Discussion” which purported to document a planning meeting held by the engagement team at the beginning of the engagement . . . But, at BF Borgers, those planning meetings did not occur. Instead, the staff level auditor simply rolled forward the Engagement Team Discussion workpaper from the prior year or quarter, updating the balance sheet date information on the document and inserting a new (and false) date of a planning meeting that never happened.

No notes. Just tremendous stuff.

Anyway, here are some other prime cuts from FTAV over the past week:

📈 Jane Street is big. Like, really, really big. FT Alphaville’s main takeaways from the secretive trading firm’s bond prospectus.

📈 Tesla’s biggest problem: cars. Driven to distraction.

📈 ‘Tigerboy’ and the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund’s flip-flop. Chatham House Misrule.

📈 Who’ll buy all the Treasuries? You’ll buy all the Treasuries. Ft. Bad some news for the non-US Anglosphere.

📈 When light floods Europe’s bond market. A look at what might happen to European fixed income once a consolidated tape is introduced.

📈 Tesla soul-searching with Adam Jonas. Zen and the art of expectation maintenance.

📈 Lockheed Martin could probably use its planes a little more efficiently. The ungrateful deadhead.

📈 Will the Fed try to spoil the FTC’s non-compete ban? The worker insecurity hypothesis versus Lina Khan.

📈 The parcel war is about to begin. Controversial things come in low-value packages

📈Inside Apollo’s alleged grim-reaper gamble. Might a STOLI cocktail leave a $20bn hangover?

📈Another pointless article about the UK’s strategic wine reserves. Return to the £3.66mn Cellar: The Plonky Version

📈Greece’s economic rebound in (painful) context. Scar tissue that I wish you saw.

📈This CEO is really making the most out of his employee discount. Sofa, so good

📈Weed after beer, and nothing’s clear. “How big a threat is cannabis legalisation to alcohol sales?” — not answered here.