Your friend, Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana knows that you are taking graduate classes and asks for your opinion on a decision he faces as owner/manager of the Bonwire Kente Company which he started in 2014.He started the Company with 20 employees but in five years it has grown by leaps and bounds to the point where it now employs over five hundred persons. Despite the challenges he faced with managing growth, the company has done well. His Board of Directors is small, seven persons, and consists mainly friends and family members.

Within two years of its formation, it was traded on the Ghana Stock Exchange located in Accra and a year after on the Casablanca Stock Exchange in Morocco. On both stock exchanges the company's shares were trading on the average for $25 per share.With a total of 1,000,000 shares outstanding, the average market capitalization for Bonwire Kente Company in 2019 was $25,000,000.

Kwame wants to secure listing on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) because he thinks that this is the gold standard of stock exchanges and will provide more access to funding for the expansion he wants his company to make in the next five years. He has learned that Bonwire Kente Company must have audited financial statements; that its governance structures must meet certain standards; and he has been hearing about organizations like the PCAOB, the AICPA, the SEC, the IAASB that have various rules that would affect the company and its managers before and after listing on the NYSE is secured.He has even been told that the NYSE itself has certain stringent rules governing the companies listed. However, he does not know the process and he has never been audited by one of the Big Four accounting firms.

Write to Kwame explaining the auditing process that his company will have to undergo in order to secure audited financial statements to support his application for listing on the NYSE.