Tether CEO Says Big Accounting Firms Shying Away from Tether
Paolo Ardoino disclosed that big accounting firms want to work with Tether but they’re not interested in working because of the reputation damage fears.
Tether is a stablecoin firm which is mainly known for its USDT stablecoin. Tether maintains all the management work behind the USDT stablecoin. Over the past couple of years, this stablecoin firm showed a significant inclination toward better transparency in the backend financial operations.
On 18 April 2024, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino appeared in an interview with DL News. The interviewer asked why Tether doesn’t produce audits of its reserves?
Paolo said that big accounting firms hesitate to work with Tether due to concerns about potential damage to their reputations.
The Tether CEO named Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG as the top accounting firms and said that they are fearing to work with Tether but it will be the company’s priority to hire one of them as Tether’s auditor.
The current market value of USDT stablecoin is nearly $108 billion. This stablecoin is the top choice among crypto investors to transfer funds from one crypto platform to another.
Over the past couple of years, Tether faced huge criticism over its reserves. Many times Tether critics claimed that USDT is not exactly pegged to US dollar value & may collapse badly.
So the audit report for this stablecoin firm is now a very important thing and obviously a small auditor can’t do this job perfectly to inject 100% trust among critics as well as USDT users.
Ardoino explained that stablecoin companies like Tether and Circle (USDC) might not be as profitable for audit firms as traditional financial firms because blockchain-based assets are easier to audit.
Tether reserves & lack of trust
Between 2014 to 2017, Tether failed to publish reports on its reserves. But later following the allegations of lack of reserves behind USDT stablecoin, Tether has relied on quarterly attestations since 2022.
It is worth noting that a financial audit of any firm is not only about the financial position of the company, instead a genuine audit firm report may disclose every type of risk associated with that firm e.g. risks unknown to the business in question, and an audit may also reveal compliance issues at the business.
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