This study investigates whether target firms’ financial reporting quality affects the likelihood that merger and acquisition (M&A) deals will ultimately be terminated. Managers looking to increase their market share, enter new markets, or diversify their operations will consider acquiring another company based on the company’s performance, geographic locations, and lines of business, respectively. If the potential target is a U.S. publicly traded company, an acquirer’s initial assessment of the expected benefits associated with the acquisition of the company is based on publicly available information. Generally, the acquirer obtains limited private information from the target prior to the signing of the acquisition agreement. Although an acquisition agreement creates a binding contractual obligation for both entities to go forward with the deal, it does not guarantee completion of the deal. The acquisition agreement typically contains a warranty by the target that its financial statements are prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). If this warranty is breached, the deal can be terminated. We hypothesize that low-quality financial reporting by target firms prior to the announcement of a deal increases the likelihood that a target firm’s U.S. GAAP warranties stated in the acquisition agreement are breached. Therefore, we predict that deals involving targets with low-quality financial reporting are more likely to be terminated (i.e., go bust).
Based on prior research, we identify five measures of low-quality financial reporting: the magnitude of discretionary accruals (Dechow, Sloan, and Sweeney 1995); the likelihood of a weakness in internal control (Doyle, Ge, and McVay 2007; Ashbaugh-Skaife, Collins, and Kinney 2007), off-balance-sheet liabilities (Barth 1991); analysts’ forecast error (Lang and Lundholm 1996); and analysts’ forecast dispersion (Barron, Kim, Lim, and Stevens 1998). The first three measures are intended to capture noise and ⁄ or bias in financial reporting that affects the relevance and representational faithfulness of the target’s financial statements. Greater discretionary accruals, greater likelihood of internal control problems, and more off-balance-sheet liabilities are indicators of less reliable, less relevant, low-quality financial reporting. The last two measures are used to assess the precision of the target’s financial information where greater analysts’ forecast error and greater analysts’ forecast dispersion signal less precise, less certain, low-quality financial reporting related to targets’ performance and operations. We combine these measures to construct a low-quality financial reporting (LQFR) score and use this score in our empirical tests examining the M&A market consequences of targets’ financial reporting quality.