Assessing Ethics and Compliance in M&A-Episode 1

Over this series, I am visiting with Eric Feldman, Senior Vice President, Don Stern, Managing Director of Corporate Monitoring & Consulting Services, and Rod Grandon, Managing Director of Government Services, from Affiliated Monitors, Inc., (AMI) who is the sponsor of this series. In it, we explore how to go about assessing ethics and compliance in the mergers and acquisition (M&A) context. In this first episode I visit with Feldman on the why’s, what’s and how’s of an independent assessment of a target.

In this episode some of the key discussion points are:

1. What kinds of things should companies look for when doing M&A due diligence?
2. What questions should be asked to determine if there is a challenge with the corporate ethical culture of a target company?
3. With often limited access and information in a confidential transaction, how is a company supposed to get the data it needs to determine the status of a company’s ethics and compliance program?
4. Can you provide some examples where better due diligence might have changed the outcome where ethical failures subsequently occurred?