Maxwell Financials

I can’t speak to the exact engagement Jeff Maxwell has engaged Dennis Craven for, but the limitation in allowing distribution of the financials he speaks of is legitimate. My guess is that these financials are extremely speculative in nature because of the current status of the project. When an accountants work product requires an intimate knowledge of the goings on of a company and the risks involved in order to understand the numbers presented, professional accounting standards require that Users (capitalized because it is a professional definition) be limited to the people with that intimate knowledge for business decision-making process only. If one does not have that knowledge, the numbers can be misconstrued and so the work product does not fulfill the purpose for which it was intended. If the accounting firm releases those financials knowing they will be used by anyone other than the defined User, it can jeopardize their professional licensing.



In order to release financial information to the City, Maxwell will have to have a different engagement done, based on less speculative numbers. The way I understand it, the only way the numbers become less speculative is for the Council to agree on and sign a PUD. So my guess is that the Council is putting Maxwell in a Catch 22, but that might be wrong - perhaps Craven has not expressed what it would take to be able to produce financials.

Tim Terry was correct that, in order to fulfill his professional duty, he would need to see Maxwell's financials, because that was what he was directed to do by the Council. But, in my opinion, Terry was being unreasonable to not even attempt to satisfy his duty given the constraints Craven had to impose in order to fulfill HIS professional duty.

I appreciated the statements by Tim Oswald and John Danos that the developer's financials were not necessary at this point: that any issues we had with the solvency of the builder could be protected against in the Development and TIF agreements.