Latin superstar Romeo Santos is suing his longtime accounting and business management firm, claiming its “gross negligence” left him with unpaid tax bills and ultimately cost him millions of dollars in damages.
In a lawsuit obtained and first reported by Billboard, Santos (Anthony Santos) claims that BDO USA botched his financial affairs so badly that it amounted to professional malpractice — and that the company has since “rebuffed every overture” to find an “amicable solution” to the problem.
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“For nearly seven years, Santos … entrusted his financial affairs to an accounting and business-management practice that sold itself as a dedicated entertainment-industry specialist,” writes his attorney, James Sammataro of the firm Pryor Cashman. “What [BDO] delivered instead was gross negligence, year after year.”
Santos isn’t the first music star to complain about BDO. Back in 2022, Fat Joe filed a lawsuit claiming the firm and two of its employees stole millions of dollars in “brazen” fraud that has the “hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme.” The case later settled in 2024 on confidential terms.
Santos broke out in the early 2000s as the lead singer of Aventura, a bachata group that’s put 13 songs in the top 10 of Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart. After launching a solo career in 2011, Santos has released seven hits that have topped the Hot Latin Songs chart, including 2014’s “Odio” collab with Drake and 2011’s “Promise” featuring Usher.
According to Wednesday’s (Aug. 12) lawsuit, Santos initially hired the firm Morrison Brown Argiz & Farra LLP in 2016; the company was later acquired by BDO in 2021. He says he did so because the firm sold itself as an “entertainment-industry specialist” that could effectively manage the business affairs of “a global touring and recording artist and the multistate and international tax exposure that comes with it.”
But he says BDO’s subsequent failures “spanned nearly every function it was retained to perform,” including basic functions like properly paying his taxes and filing returns. He also says the firm botched his New York state taxes, filing an “incoherent” return that sparked a costly audit, and also failed to file for credits on foreign taxes already withheld from his royalties.
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“The withholding was no secret: it appeared on the face of the royalty statements in BDO’s files,” his lawyers write. “Yet year after year, the credits went unclaimed.”
When he finally fired the company in 2023, Santos says BDO quickly withdrew money from his own account without authorization to pay its own fees. “The episode is a fitting coda to the engagement: the firm that could not manage to remit Santos’ taxes on time remitted its own fee without delay — after it was fired from his account, without asking,” the suit reads. “To this day, BDO has not returned the money.”
All told, the lawsuit claims that Santos is owed at least $2.3 million in damages, stemming from tax penalties and interest, the unapproved withdrawal, the cost of hiring new accountants to fix the problems and “lost value” from other professional missteps.
“Two years of demands, documentation, and patience had produced BDO’s acknowledgment of ‘specific errors,’ its silence on the core failures, and nothing else — leaving plaintiffs with no choice but to initiate legal action,” Santos’ attorneys write.
A spokesperson for BDO did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday (Aug. 13).