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Patisserie Holdings Said It Was Hiring an Audit Firm That No Longer Exists to Replace Grant Thornton U.K. as Auditor

Posted on by Jason Bramwell

It’s the Friday before Christmas, and when you have a bad case of holiday brain, sometimes mistakes can happen. Sometimes these mistakes can be hilarious. Like this one from Patisserie Holdings, parent company of U.K. coffeehouse chain Patisserie Valerie:

What Patisserie Holdings meant to say was that it was hiring RSM U.K. as its new auditor, which the company stated in a corrected press release issued two hours later:

 

Patisserie Holdings is dumping Grant Thornton U.K. as auditor because GT is under investigation by the Financial Reporting Council for its audit of Patisserie’s financial statements for 2015-17.

The café chain almost collapsed this year due to “potentially fraudulent” accounting irregularities, which set off a chain of events that included the suspension, and then resignation, of CFO Chris Marsh, who was arrested on Oct. 12 before being released on bail.

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Grant Thornton Picks Up Four Tax-Exempt Experts from WTAS

We’ve confirmed that Grant Thornton has poached four tax-exempt experts from WTAS, LLC. Presumably beefing up their NFP practice is part of the experienceAugust that Stephen Chipman told the GT troops about last week. Grant Thornton employees received an email last night about the news:

“In line with the strategic plan of our firm and in support of our growing not-for-profit industry practice we are pleased to announce that four experienced tax professionals, formerly of WTAS LLC, have joined our Firm. Frank Giardini, who lead WTAS’ National Exempt Tax Advisory Services Practice (ETAS) as well as Ron Taxin, ETAS Director, Russlee Armstrong, ETAS Director and Andrea Kyzyma, ETAS Manager recently joined us. These individuals bring over 70 years of combined experience in providing tax services to significant non- profit organizations, especially in the higher education and healthcare industries. They have served the tax needs of many large public charities and private foundations. Frank and his group are based out in our Philadelphia office, but will serve clients in both the Northeast and Southeast regions. This group will also play a key role assisting our national NFP tax leader, Dan Romano, in serving GT’s national clients as well as supporting the NFP tax professionals throughout the firm.

A source familiar with WTAS, confirmed these departures, saying that they occurred earlier this summer and thought the move was “a good opportunity for them.” Emails and morse code messages sent to Grant Thornton have not been returned.