Tether Got Its First Full KPMG Audit and Still Won't Show You the Report

Tether has moved toward the audit critics have demanded for years. It still hasn't delivered the thing that would settle the argument: a published, completed audit anyone can read.

Tether has not completed a KPMG audit, and it has not published audited financial statements for Tether International. The real news is narrower, but still important: on March 24, 2026, Tether said it had hired an unnamed Big Four accounting firm to carry out its first full independent financial statement audit. That is useful. It isn't enough.

If you use USDT, trade against it, or rely on markets where it is the main dollar substitute, this distinction matters more than Tether's press release language. A signed engagement is not an audit opinion. It is a promise to start the process, from a company that has been promising a full audit in one form or another since the last crypto cycle looked completely different.

The audit still has not arrived

For years, Tether has published reserve attestations rather than full financial statement audits. Those reports are prepared by Tether management and checked by BDO Italia at quarter end, which means they speak to a snapshot of reserves and liabilities at a specific date. That's not a technical quibble. An attestation tells you what was shown at one point in time. A full audit digs through the financial statements, controls, records and evidence behind the numbers.

In its March 24 announcement, Tether said the Big Four firm had already reviewed its systems, internal controls and financial reporting during onboarding. The company did not name the firm. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said in the company statement that trust is built when institutions are willing to open themselves to scrutiny, while CFO Simon McWilliams said the firm was selected through a competitive process and that "the audit will be delivered."

That sentence is doing a lot of work. According to Tether's own transparency page, the most recent reserve report as of March 31, 2026 showed total assets of $191.77 billion, total liabilities of $183.54 billion and net equity of $8.23 billion. Those are large numbers for any private company. They are enormous for one whose main product is used as trading collateral across crypto exchanges, DeFi protocols and dollar markets outside the banking system.

Private company, public consequences

Bloomberg Law reported in March that Tether had entered a formal engagement with a Big Four accounting firm, but that the company did not specify which firm it was working with. CoinDesk reported the same basic fact: Tether had hired a Big Four firm for a full audit of USDT reserves, without naming the auditor.

That leaves you in an awkward place. Tether wants the credibility of Big Four involvement, but it has not given the market the auditor's name, the final report, the audited statements or a date when those documents will be public. You can see why the company wants credit. You can also see why skeptics are not done asking questions.

Circle gives the cleaner comparison. Circle says USDC reserve holdings are disclosed weekly and that a Big Four accounting firm provides monthly third-party assurance on whether USDC reserves exceed circulation. Circle is also a public company, so its financial statements sit in SEC filings where investors, competitors and critics can read them. Tether has chosen a different model: huge scale, private ownership and selective disclosure.

The old record still matters

The skepticism around Tether is not just crypto tribalism. The New York attorney general said in 2021 that Bitfinex and Tether deceived clients and the market by overstating reserves and hiding about $850 million in losses, then required the companies to pay $18.5 million and stop trading with New Yorkers. Tether disputed parts of the framing at the time, but the settlement is real.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission followed with its own order in October 2021. The CFTC said Tether made untrue or misleading statements about USDT backing and ordered Tether to pay $41 million. It also found that Tether had sufficient fiat reserves to back USDT in circulation for only 27.6% of the days in a 26-month sample period from 2016 through 2018. That is the history the audit is supposed to answer.

Tether can answer it. It has the scale, the profits and, by its own account, the reserves. But the answer has to be the document, not the announcement about the document. Until the company publishes a completed audit and the financial statements behind it, you are still being asked to trust a private issuer whose token sits under a very public part of crypto markets.

Also read: Tokenized Stock Holders Double to 1.3 Million as Ondo Finance Leads the Pack • Strategy Sold Bitcoin Four Times This Year, and Its Stock Now Trades Below NAV • A Crypto Whale Lost $25.6 Million To The Same Phishing Trick Twice

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