You can see why they expected this to work, there are a bunch of Eastern European banks which had audits from the Big Four brand accounting firms saying everything was A-OK right up until either the bank failed entirely or was nationalised to save it from collapse.

Not be able to secure an auditor to do this suggests somebody was too cheap. It's important to spread the loot around, for example instead of paying for an audit and expecting them to lie, try paying for the same audit AND buying ten times as much "specialist professional services" from the audit company. Don't ask exactly why these services are so expensive, and in particular don't expect to see all the people you're supposedly paying for busily working on anything. Just hand over the cash and voila, your audit is spotless. What a wonderful business.