one of my least favorite things about taking VC money is when they have some audit firm email you to confirm that they own the stock. it's so annoying and they email you 25 times until you respond. if i ran a VC firm i would simply not put my founders through this suffering

As someone who ran a crypto fund that was my least favorite thing having to bother founders. We would prefill the form where possible and push back on auditors if there were other ways we could verify for them but unfortunately not. In our case, we wouldn't be able to operate as a fund if we didn't pass our audit ￼

As an ex-auditor a long time ago, the firms don’t have a choice. 

It’s an audit procedure which is required for the firms to validate the non-publicly listed holdings that eventually goes into a line item in the audit report so that the shareholders of those firms know that the management has not misused funds.