DD Support Board and Research Team

[1manband]

I've been told (via BusinessWeek) that audit companies charge extra, top dollar for auditing deadbeat sub pennies.

Not true. If that article is a couple of decades old, recall that since then, the SEC now requires all public companies to disclose all fees paid to their auditors in their SEC filings. If you look up the costs charged to smaller companies by their auditors, you can see that they can be as low as $5,000 per year.