[dhruval]

Former auditor here:

1. That is standard wording for the report of "agreed upon procedures". This is not an audit it just means they only did a certain set of procedures rather than an audit.

2. Audits aren't really able to detect all fraud, especially if the management is sophisticated. But if the fraud results in obvious material discrepancies then the audit would catch it and the auditor would resign (unless they are corrupt in which case you end up with Enron where a Big 5 auditor was complicit, so now we have the Big 4).

3. In the Binance case, the obvious weird thing is they only did these very limited agreed upon procedures on 'Bitcoin', but other crypto currencies they claim to hold were not verified at the same time. Also their other liabilities are not verified.

(As some examples: they could have some non-BTC liabilities to offset the Bitcoin or CZ moved some personal bitcoin to wallets or converted some other holdings, all sorts of possibilities. Would be hard to hide from a full audit but in this case very easy to hide. )

[throwawaymaths]

Don't forget the big four signed off on evergrande and other Chinese real estate and it seems like there will be no consequences (we can't have the big zero)

[cm2187]

Has there been an accounting fraud with Evergrande? Being overleveraged isn’t fraud.

[throwawaymaths]

It's fraud when you tell investors incorrect things in prospectuses, for example. These things are required to be signed off by auditors to participate in us stock exchanges

[nradov]

What specific statements were incorrect in the Evergrande prospectus?

[bluecalm]

>>But if the fraud results in obvious material discrepancies then the audit would catch it and the auditor would resign

Explains "no auditor wants to work with us" line used by Tether among other crypto projects.

[moneywoes]

Curious did you switch from auditing to something else?