A month after US regulators filed a lawsuit against cryptocurrency exchange Kraken in 2023, the exchange’s auditors have resigned, according to court records. Now Kraken’s parent company is suing its former Mazars USA auditors for $22 million.

The lawsuit follows a confidential arbitration in which the arbitrator, a retired judge, awarded Kraken $22 million, according to redacted copies of his decisions filed in Kraken’s lawsuit. One of its rulings noted that Mazars’ withdrawal created “a licensing crisis” for Kraken, affecting the exchange’s effort to obtain state money transmission licenses. The arbitrator awarded Kraken damages related to its purchase of TradeStation Crypto, an investment platform.

Kraken is suing to obtain that compensation. A spokesperson for Forvis Mazars did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mazars, now part of the Forvis Mazars group, stopped its work for Kraken in late 2023, just days before completing audit work on Kraken’s finances for 2022, Kraken alleges in its lawsuit. At the time, Kraken was under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and was testing the patience of state regulators by taking so long to submit the audits needed to obtain the licenses it needed, according to court records.

In 2023, Mazars received grand jury and SEC subpoenas for his Kraken files, according to court documents. Mazars stopped work on its Kraken audit a month after the SEC filed a complaint citing comments or findings that appeared to come from Mazars’ audit workpapers, according to an arbitration decision.

“When your auditor resigns with no findings against you, you inherit a cloud you did nothing to create and pay to clear a name that was never dirty,” Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Payward Inc., Kraken’s parent company, told Business Insider in an emailed statement. “We spent years and millions in legal fees doing exactly that.”

The SEC dropped its lawsuit against Kraken in March 2025, shortly after President Trump took office for his second term. The Trump administration has relaxed regulations and removed restrictions related to the crypto industry. The president reported $1.4 billion in revenue tied to crypto companies last year, according to his recent financial disclosure.

Auditor’s withdrawal sparked an acquisition

Coindesk, an industry publication, reported in 2024 that Kraken acquired the Tradestation unit in part because of its regulatory licenses. According to arbitration records, $12.5 million of the arbitration award related to the cost of the acquisition.

The arbitrator wrote that Mazars deserved “credit for being honest,” but that the auditing firm still owed millions to Kraken.

“I have no doubt that the circumstances surrounding this audit were difficult, challenging and at times frustrating,” the arbitrator wrote. “Kraken was in its early years of operation, but was rapidly growing to become a major player in the cryptocurrency world. Unfortunately, its accounting procedures and automation were lagging behind.”

Forvis Mazars is the 10th largest accounting firm in the U.S. with about $2.2 billion in revenue, according to Inside Public Accounting. Mazars, one of his predecessors, previously counted Trump among his clients, and his efforts to shield his financial records from investigators during the Biden administration were the subject of extensive litigation.