Hi Christopher, I do agree this is a difficult point and quite often the good or bad news post acquisitions are not easily identifiable when you just have an aggregated value because the synergy analysis prior to the acquisition was not clearly realized or too high level / optimistic and no preparation or transition was planned with the PMO to facilitate the method to track these synergies you just end up with a nightmare. The PMO and clear timeline with responsible and engaged workstreams ahead of the acquisition are quite key elements. Another aspect (past audit experiences and discussions with advisors) is that very often to push their political agenda or under great pressure a lot of middle or top management of the the acquirer (not only the target) will hide issues or brush them away. In fact in one case we even proposed on some key integration aspects that a “circularisation” like in audit was made to confirm if an action had been finalized as stated (i.e. When a department provides you with a set of account balance for example debt, the auditor can ask to all debtors to the company to confirm the amounts outstanding or to reply if the amount stated is incorrect or in dispute). This last part did not fly to well on one project… (not M&A actually, difficult BD project).
