Business Commons^™

P-01 Financial Reporting Fraud: How Merger And Acquisition Complexity Provide Greater Opportunities For Ceos To Engage In Wrongdoing, Carmelita J. Troy, Jong Chool Park, Madeline Domino

Celebration of Research and Creative Scholarship

Using mergers and acquisitions (M&As) as a proxy to increase organizational complexity, we build upon Schnatterly et al.’s (2018) framework to addresses the gap in the management literature relating to how major firm disruptions, such as M&As, provide greater opportunities to entrenched CEOs for financial statement fraud due to higher levels of complexity. We extend the research on complexity-based information asymmetries (Ndofor et al. 2015) by empirically investigating whether accounting fraud is linked to M&As using a diverse set of variables. We propose the complex nature of M&A transactions result in higher information asymmetry, which provides a “veil” for self-interested …