Due Diligence within M&As

Requirements:

Overview: We learn about a variety of topic in ACCT 424 Advanced Accounting, including the very important topic of accounting for business mergers and acquisitions (M&As). In addition to the “debit and credits” of M&As there is a host of activities an accountant would be involved in if they get involved in M&As in practice. One such activity is that of Due Diligence. By performing this activity, you will not only accomplish required learning objectives, you will also develop an understanding of what Due Diligence is, a very important topic to have knowledge about in practice.

The Scenario: Place yourself in the role of a new team member at an organization that’s just begun the process of negotiating being acquired by another company. Your team lead has come to you and your co-workers and told you that in a month’s time the other company will be starting the process of Due Diligence, and your team is going to need to support that effort. Well, your company has never been bought out before, so this whole process is new to everyone, including this Due Diligence thing.

Since your team lead knows you successfully completed Advanced Accounting at UMUC, she knows you’re the best of the best and as such she assigns you the task of researching Due Diligence within the context of M&As, and wants you to report back to the team with two specific deliverables: a Research Tracker and an Annotated Bibliography.

Part I – The Research Tracker

A Research Tracker is a straight forward activity that can be thought of as something that simply “tells the story” of your thought process and logic used in finding information on a subject. In our case, that subject is going to be Due Diligence within M&As. Your requirement for the Research Tracker deliverable will be to research the subject of Due Diligence within M&As and create a basic Research Tracker to report on your results. The submitted deliverable should take the form of a chart created in Word or Excel that “tells the story” of your research efforts.

An example of a Research Tracker for the subject of “Violence in Television” is shown below. Your submission for our purposes of researching Due Diligence within M&As should use the same format and column heading as this example, and be completed using the same logic. For our class, about 10 rows / topics should suffice. This is the first part of this activity for our class, and your submission consisting of a Word document or Excel file is to be made as part of your week #7 submission. This part of this activity is worth 3% of your final grade, and will be evaluated based on the grading matrix presented at the end of this document.