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Tether Taps Big Four in Historic Audit

Stablecoin issuer Tether $USDT ( ▼ 0.01% ) has engaged a Big Four accounting firm for its inaugural audit, which it describes as its "first full independent financial statement audit" and claims it will be the biggest ever inaugural audit in the history of financial markets. Tether has a market cap of $184 billion for its USDT coin and has struggled for years to land a Big Four auditor. The firm did not reveal which of the four, PwC, EY, Deloitte, or KPMG, will conduct the audit.

Tether's CEO had previously said the Big Four firms were reluctant to work with the crypto giant out of concern it would damage their reputations.

Why it matters: Tether's USDT is the world's largest stablecoin, acting as the backbone of trillions of dollars in crypto transactions annually. Despite its scale, Tether has long operated without a full independent audit, meaning no one outside the company could formally verify that every USDT in circulation was actually backed by a real dollar. That lack of transparency made regulators, institutional investors, and even some crypto enthusiasts deeply uneasy. If this audit confirms Tether's reserves are legitimate, it could be a watershed moment for crypto credibility, potentially opening the door for greater institutional adoption and clearer regulation. If it reveals problems, the fallout could ripple across the entire crypto market.

Student Takeaway: This story sits at the intersection of two things you'll hear constantly in accounting and finance courses: attestation and reputational risk. An audit isn't just a checklist, it's a firm putting its name and credibility on the line to say "we verified this." The fact that Big Four firms spent years avoiding Tether precisely because of reputational risk is a masterclass in how professional service firms think about client selection.

The Pentagon is Recruiting Wall Street Bankers

I’m you’ve already heard, the U.S. Department of Defense is making an unusual move and is heading to Wall Street to recruit investment bankers. The Pentagon is targeting analysts and associates at firms like Goldman Sachs $GS ( ▲ 0.33% ) , Morgan Stanley $MS ( ▼ 0.22% ) , JPMorgan $JPM ( ▼ 0.26% ) , and Bank of America $BAC ( ▲ 0.22% ) for a two-to-three-year secondment program, with the goal of deploying $200 billion in defense-related deals over the next three years.

The driving force behind this is geopolitical. The U.S. government is increasingly viewing economic competition with China not just as a trade issue, but as a national security issue, and it wants people who understand deal-making, capital markets, and financial structuring sitting inside the Pentagon, not just on the outside advising it. The idea is that Wall Street bankers bring skills the government doesn't naturally cultivate: speed, financial modeling, deal sourcing, and the ability to structure complex transactions at scale.

A "secondment," for those unfamiliar, is when an employee is temporarily loaned or transferred to another organization, in this case, from a major bank to the federal government. These bankers would essentially be embedded inside the DoD, working on defense financing strategy, M&A activity around defense contractors, and investment initiatives designed to counter China's economic and military buildup. After the program, they'd presumably return to their firms with a rare and highly marketable combination of Wall Street and government experience.

Student Takeaway: If you're studying finance, accounting, or economics, this story is a reminder that your skills are more transferable than you might think. Investment banking training, financial modeling, valuation, deal structuring, is clearly valued far beyond Wall Street itself. But there's a deeper lesson here about the concept of a secondment and non-linear career paths. The traditional playbook of "climb the ladder at one firm" is giving way to careers that zigzag between the private sector, government, and nonprofits. A stint at the Pentagon wouldn't just be meaningful public service, it would be a career differentiator. Keep an eye on programs like this as you think about your early career.

Definition: An independent auditor is a certified professional, typically a CPA or an accounting firm, that examines a company's financial statements and records without having any financial interest in, or affiliation with, the company being audited. The "independence" part is everything. It's what gives the audit its credibility. If the auditor had a stake in the outcome, their conclusions couldn't be trusted. Independence is so critical that it's governed by strict professional standards and ethics rules, auditors can't own stock in their clients, can't have close personal relationships with company executives, and must disclose any potential conflicts of interest.

The goal of an independent auditor is to provide reasonable assurance that a company's financial statements are free from material misstatement, whether due to error or fraud, and that they fairly represent the company's true financial position.

Say a publicly traded retail company, call it Maple & Co., closes out its fiscal year and prepares its annual financial statements. Before those statements are released to investors and regulators, an independent auditing firm, let's say one of the Big Four, is hired to examine them.

The auditors review Maple & Co.'s revenue figures, inventory valuations, debt obligations, and internal controls. Because the auditing firm has no ownership stake in Maple & Co. and no personal ties to its leadership, investors can trust that the resulting audit opinion is objective. If the auditors sign off, the market gains confidence in those numbers. If they raise red flags, that's a serious signal that something may be wrong.

This is exactly why the Tether story is so significant, for years, no independent auditor of that caliber was willing to touch them. Now that a Big Four firm is stepping in, the crypto market finally gets a credible, outside set of eyes on whether Tether's reserves are everything the company claims they are.

Mistake: Freezing up on technicals and not thinking out loud

This is one of the most common mistakes students make in accounting and finance interviews. You're sitting across from a recruiter or senior associate, things are going well, and then they hit you with a technical question. Maybe it's "walk me through a DCF," or "what happens to the three financial statements when depreciation increases by $10?" Your mind goes blank. You panic. You either blurt out a half-baked answer or sit in silence hoping the right words materialize.

Silence is the worst thing you can do. However, getting the answer perfectly right isn’t always the most important thing either.

Interviewers, especially at Big Four firms and investment banks, ask technical questions not just to test what you know, but to see how you think. They want to watch your brain work in real time. Can you stay calm under pressure? Do you approach problems logically? Can you reason your way toward an answer even when you're not 100% sure? Those are the qualities they're actually evaluating, because that's exactly what the job demands every single day.

What thinking out loud looks like in practice: Instead of freezing when asked "what happens to the financial statements if inventory increases by $100?", you might say something like "Okay, let me work through this. On the balance sheet, inventory goes up by $100, so assets increase. That inventory was purchased, so either cash goes down if it's a cash purchase, or accounts payable goes up if it's on credit. The income statement isn't affected yet because we haven't sold the inventory..." and so on. Even if you stumble slightly, the interviewer can see your framework, your logic, and your composure. That's infinitely more impressive than silence followed by a guess.

How to practice: The fix for this mistake is simple but requires deliberate effort, practice answering technical questions out loud, not just in your head. Grab a study partner, use a mirror, or record yourself. Work through accounting equation problems, valuation concepts, or ratio analysis questions and narrate every step of your thinking as you go. Over time, thinking out loud becomes second nature, and the freeze response starts to disappear.

This is one of those habits that sounds almost too simple to matter, and that's exactly why most students and early-career professionals never do it. But the people who do swear by it.

Here's the concept: open a Google Doc, a Notes app, or whatever you actually use consistently, and start logging your accomplishments in real time. Every time you get positive feedback from a professor or supervisor, write it down. Every time you finish a project, note what you did and what the outcome was. Every time you hit a metric, finished a deliverable ahead of schedule, caught an error in a financial model, contributed an idea that got used, log it. Date it. Keep it running.

That's it. That's the whole habit.

The problem with not doing this is that memory is unreliable, especially under pressure. Fast forward to six months into your internship when your supervisor asks you to summarize your contributions for a performance review. If you haven't been tracking, you'll be digging through foggy memories trying to reconstruct things that felt significant at the time but have since blurred together.

The wins document solves this entirely. When that moment comes, you open your doc and the evidence is already there, organized, specific, and in your own words.

I hope everyone is pushing through the last half of their semesters strong. If you have an internship lined up for this summer, congrats. If you don’t, it’s not the end of the world. If you’re an underclassmen and are having a hard time looking for internships, you might have better luck looking of other opportunities. Most internships don’t want underclassmen, especially freshmen. So, I recommend searching for “leadership opportunities” that are designed for underclassmen. Examples of these would be:

There are many more out there besides these, you just have to look for them. Most of these applications have already closed for this year, so start looking into these for next year if you aren’t having luck with internships.

Invest in yourself.

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My name is Braunsen Bax, I’m a honors finance and accounting student-athlete at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois (45 mins outside of Chicago). I graduated from Walton High School in Marietta Georgia. Outside of the classroom I compete in the throws events for the Track & Field team, 35 time NCAA DIII national champions. I’ve had a love of finance and the business world since my sophomore year of high school and started Campus Capital to share that love with my community and like minded individuals in a similar position, with similar goals. My mission is to help people like me shape their futures to ensure they reach their goals while being up to date and educated in the Finance industry.