Reserves and resources auditors — known as Competent Persons (CP) in Australia and Qualified Persons (QP) in Canada — are the qualified mining professionals and consulting firms that provide independent assessments of mining companies' mineral resources and ore reserves under internationally recognised reporting codes: NI 43-101 (Canada), JORC Code (Australia/international) and SAMREC (South Africa). This directory lists the principal CP/QP consulting firms and the standards bodies that publish the codes.
Alphabetical. Standards bodies listed alongside consulting firms.
World Gold Trust Services, LLC, sponsor of SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), engages Bureau Veritas Commodities UK Ltd. (formerly Inspectorate International Limited) to conduct two counts per year of the gold bullion held at HSBC Bank plc's London vault and JPMorgan Chase Bank vaults in London, New York, and Zurich: a complete bar count coinciding with the Trust's September 30 fiscal year-end, and a random sample count at another date within the same fiscal year (State Street Global Advisors, SPDR Gold Trust FAQ). A March 2024 inspection certificate documents the methodology directly: Bureau Veritas performed a statistically random count of 782 bars out of a total custodial holding of 30,963 London Good Delivery bars (12,469,297.739 fine troy ounces), reconciled the Trustee's records (Bank of New York Mellon) against the Custodian's records, verified bar number, refiner code, and purity for each counted bar, and gross-check-weighed a minimum of 2.5% of the sampled bars plus tested them for foreign-material inclusions using a Fischer Sigmascope B — finding no administrative or physical non-conformities (Bureau Veritas / World Gold Trust Services, Count of Gold Bullion Certificate, 29 March 2024).
The same protocol appears across other LBMA-linked physically backed products. Invesco Physical Gold ETC's June 2021 audit report shows Bureau Veritas (then trading as Inspectorate International) conducting a full count of 17,559 bars at JPMorgan's London vault, with a 10% random sub-sample of those bars physically verified against year of manufacture, serial numbers, refiner brands, and purity, and check-weighed on a calibrated Sartorius scale (Invesco, Audit Report — Invesco Physical Gold ETC, July 2021). GraniteShares' BAR ETF discloses that its custodian, ICBC Standard Bank Plc, is inspected by Bureau Veritas twice annually, with inspection reports published back to January 2023 (GraniteShares, BAR ETF Product Page and Inspection Reports). Sponsor due-diligence visits are separate and additional: State Street discloses that the GLD sponsor "generally visits the vaults of the Custodians twice a year" independent of the Bureau Veritas counts (SSGA, SPDR Gold Trust FAQ).
Gold ETF trusts that are SEC registrants engage PCAOB-registered independent auditors, whose work is distinct from and additional to the bar-count inspections. Under PCAOB AS 2510, Auditing Inventories, "observation of inventories is a generally accepted auditing procedure," and an auditor issuing an opinion without having performed or overseen physical observation "has the burden of justifying the opinion expressed" (PCAOB, AS 2510: Auditing Inventories). AS 2510 requires the auditor to evaluate management's count instructions, observe count procedures, inspect inventory condition, and perform independent test counts when inventory is material to the financial statements (PCAOB, AS 2510). Where inventory sits with an outside custodian, AS 2510 paragraph .14 requires direct written confirmation from the custodian and, for significant holdings, one or more additional procedures — testing the custodian's control procedures, obtaining an independent accountant's report on those controls, or observing physical counts directly (PCAOB, AS 2510). A December 2025 comment letter to the PCAOB flagged that paragraph .14's "significant proportion" threshold lets auditors frequently omit direct observation at third-party warehouses, and proposed making physical observation mandatory whenever custodied inventory is material — a live standard-setting debate directly relevant to gold-vault audits (PCAOB Standard-Setting Comment Letter, Proposed Updates to AS 2510).
In practice, auditors of physically backed bullion trusts now designate bullion existence as a critical audit matter under PCAOB rules requiring disclosure of especially subjective or complex audit judgments. Sprott Physical Gold Trust's audited FY2025 financial statements identify "Evaluation of Existence of Physical Bullion" as a critical audit matter given the trust's 3,693,298 troy ounces ($15.95 billion) of custodied bullion, with the auditor testing internal controls over trade approvals, periodic reconciliations between the Trust's and custodian's records, the annual physical bullion count, and the roll-forward of holdings from the last physical inspection date to year-end (Sprott, Annual Report to Unitholders, PHYS, Q4 2025). This dual structure — specialist bar-count inspection plus PCAOB-governed financial-statement audit treating existence as a critical matter — is the closest thing the private market has to an institutional gold-reserve audit standard, and it operates entirely independently of any government body.
SEC-registered gold trusts must describe their inspection regime in annual Form 10-K filings, creating a public disclosure trail independent of both Bureau Veritas certificates and PCAOB audit opinions. GraniteShares Gold Trust's 10-K discloses that its Sponsor is contractually responsible for appointing accountants and physical gold auditors (currently Bureau Veritas) to examine the Custodian's premises, and that the Custody Agreements grant the Sponsor, Trustee, and their representatives access rights that survive changes of custodian (StreetInsider / SEC EDGAR, GraniteShares Gold Trust Form 10-K). A Bureau Veritas audit letter for the Goldman Sachs Physical Gold ETF (reference 22003291, dated July 6, 2022) shows the identical methodology applied across issuers: reconciling custodian and client records, visually checking each bar for manufacture year, bar number, refiner brand, and purity, and weighing a minimum 2.5% random sample to the nearest thousandth of a troy ounce (Bureau Veritas / Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Gold Bullion Audit Letter, July 2022). Notably, custody agreements can carve out audit-access limits: abrdn's gold trust discloses that sub-custodian the Bank of England "has a policy to not permit any audit visits to its vault premises," a disclosed gap in the otherwise-uniform inspection regime (SEC EDGAR, SGOL Prospectus Supplement, May 2024).
Separately, SEC Rule 206(4)-2 (the investment-adviser custody rule) requires advisers with custody of client assets to undergo either an annual surprise examination by an independent public accountant or, for pooled investment vehicles, an annual financial-statement audit by a PCAOB-registered accountant distributed to investors within 120 days of fiscal year-end — the mechanism that makes the PCAOB audit opinion a substitute for a surprise exam in the ETF-trust structure (Deloitte / SEC, Custody of Funds or Securities of Clients by Investment Advisers, Rule 206(4)-2 Compliance Guide).
The US Mint's deep-storage gold reserves — held at the United States Bullion Depository (Fort Knox), West Point, and Denver — were subject to a genuine physical verification program only once: the Committee for Continuing Audit of U.S. Government-owned Gold operated from 1975 to 1986 under Treasury Department Order 234-1, physically verifying roughly 10% of holdings each year and sealing verified compartments under Official Joint Seal (Treasury Office of Inspector General, Statement on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology, OIG-CA-11-007). By 1986, roughly 97% of Deep Storage gold had been physically verified this way; a 1985 audit report confirms 233.8 million of 262.6 million fine troy ounces (89%) had been verified under the initial continuing-audit program by that date (US Mint / Treasury, Summary Report of Continuing Audits of United States Government-Owned Gold, September 30, 1985). Treasury's OIG has performed annual audits since fiscal year 1993 pursuant to 31 U.S.C. § 5136 and the Government Management Reform Act, but by the OIG's own 2011 congressional testimony, that work primarily verifies the Mint's Schedule of Custodial Deep Storage Gold Reserves against accounting records — not a fresh physical recount of every bar (Treasury OIG, OIG-CA-11-007).
Treasury's most recent published gold-reserve audit, OIG-24-004, covering gold held at Federal Reserve Banks as of September 30, 2023 and 2022, illustrates the modern scope: the auditors opined that the Schedules of gold reserves "present fairly, in all material respects" the reported balances, based on procedures including examining evidence on a test basis, understanding internal controls, and evaluating accounting estimates — with no stated physical bar count or seal inspection described in the report itself (Treasury OIG, Audit of the Department of the Treasury's Schedules of United States Gold Reserves Held by Federal Reserve Banks, OIG-24-004). That report confirms the Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds 99.98% of Federal-Reserve-custodied US gold (13,452,810.532 fine troy ounces total, statutory value $568,007,257 at the fixed $42.2222/oz rate), with the remainder distributed across other Reserve Bank districts (Treasury OIG, OIG-24-004).
On June 6, 2025, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), joined by Reps. Warren Davidson, Addison McDowell, and Troy Nehls, introduced H.R. 3795, the Gold Reserve Transparency Act of 2025, which would direct the Comptroller General (GAO) to conduct "the first true audit of gold owned by the United States in more than 65 years," covering gold in deep-storage locations including Fort Knox, with subsequent audits every five years, a report on physical-security sufficiency, a full accounting of any encumbrances against the reserves, and documentation of all sales, purchases, disbursements, or receipts over the prior 50 years (GovInfo, H.R. 3795, Gold Reserve Transparency Act of 2025 (Introduced in House); Congressman Thomas Massie, Rep. Massie Introduces Bill to Audit U.S. Gold Reserves). The bill was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services and had not been reported out as of mid-2026.
Precious-metals advocacy group Money Metals Exchange (affiliated with the state-legislative Sound Money Defense League) published an open letter to President Trump in February 2025 arguing that Treasury's characterization of its annual OIG/KPMG-accompanied reviews as a genuine gold audit is misleading: the letter notes the OIG inspects only the tamper-evident seals placed on vault compartments during the 1974–1986 continuing-audit program, and that Deep Storage compartments at West Point were never audited under that original program, while some Fort Knox and Denver compartments were controversially "re-audited" between 1983 and 1986 after seals had already been applied (US Treasury — Status Report of US Government Gold Reserve). A parallel Freedom of Information Act investigation found that seven of the original audit reports from the 1974–1986 program are missing from Treasury's disclosed archive (BullionStar, U.S. Government Lost 7 Fort Knox Gold Audit Reports).
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated in February 2025 that internal audits verify the gold annually and reiterated in mid-2026 that the fiscal year 2025 audit report confirms "all the gold is there," pointing to the OIG's published OIG-26-002 report on the Schedules of Custodial Deep Storage Gold and Silver Reserves, which found the September 30, 2025 and 2024 schedules "presented fairly, in all material respects" with "no material weaknesses" in internal control and no reportable noncompliance for fiscal year 2025 (Treasury OIG, OIG-26-002, Financial Management Audit of the United States Mint's Schedules of Custodial Deep Storage Gold and Silver Reserves; Yahoo Finance, Trump Wants Fort Knox "Physically Audited" After Stunning $40M Arrest). Critics counter that this is an opinion on the accounting schedules, not a physical recount, and note that OIG's own materiality threshold — roughly $310 million based on the value of US gold holdings — would not catch discrepancies smaller than that scale even if a physical count were performed (United States Gold Bureau, Is the Gold in Fort Knox Still There?). President Trump revived calls for a physical audit in May and June 2026 following the conflict-driven scrutiny of federal asset custody, but as of this writing no new physical verification program has been announced or funded beyond H.R. 3795's pending status in committee (Newsorga, "They Steal a Lot": Trump Revives Fort Knox Gold Audit Pitch). Independent industry modeling of what a genuine physical audit under H.R. 3795 would require estimates a minimum 18-month process to count, weigh, inspect, and sample all 368,250 bars at Fort Knox — roughly 42,963 cumulative person-hours across organization, physical counting, and discrepancy-reconciliation phases — illustrating why the Bureau Veritas-style semi-annual ETF protocol (a statistical sample, not a full recount) is not logistically comparable to a sovereign-scale audit (JM Bullion, Can Fort Knox Be Audited? Here's How Long It Could Potentially Take).