The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged the auditor of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX with misconduct, saying the firm took on Sam Bankman-Fried’s company as a client without properly understanding the crypto market.

Prager Metis, an accounting firm that ranks outside the top 50 US firms by revenue, gave a clean bill of health to FTX’s financial results for the two years before it collapsed in November 2022 with an $8bn hole in its balance sheet.

“In its rush to accept FTX as an audit client, Prager Metis assembled an engagement team that collectively lacked the competence, experience, and knowledge to appropriately conduct the audits,” the SEC’s complaint alleged, including a lead partner who “fundamentally did not understand FTX, or the crypto asset markets in which it operated”.