Sharon Bromberg

Sharon Bromberg is a partner with CohnReznick Advisory, focusing on restructuring, litigation and transactional services. She has 20 years of audit and accounting experience covering a wide range of industries including retail and consumer products, professional services, financial services, software, manufacturing, and distribution.

Sharon has advised on public and private transactions involving stand-alone platform acquisitions, business segment carve outs, and start-up and roll-up transactions. She has worked with private equity sponsors, corporate acquirers and sellers, traditional lenders and alternative capital providers, and has worked on several cross-border M&A transactions. She has also been involved in scores of due diligence assignments, representing potential purchasers and investors in all aspects of the process, including quality of earnings; normalized EBITDA analyses; compliance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles; transition services agreements; purchase price disputes; and post-transaction and integration issues.

Sharon also provides accounting malpractice services, fraud investigations, forensic accounting, litigation support, and expert witness testimony services. She advises on a wide variety of business matters, including issues related to contract disputes, liquidity, and solvency, representing the company, unsecured creditor committees, secured lenders, and trustees. With significant Chapter 11 experience, she has been directly involved in many asset sales conducted under court supervision.

Experience Highlights

Sharon led a team that provided buy-side due diligence to a steel processing company. We identified that the target’s prior-year gross margin was exceptionally high; these results were caused by the target’s purchase of inventory prior to an industry-wide increase in raw materials and the sale of the finished product at current market rates. This artificial boost in gross margins was a non-recurring event. As a result, we recommended that our client reduce its purchase price considerably.

CohnReznick served as financial advisors for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court-appointed examiner in the WorldCom bankruptcy proceedings, one of the largest bankruptcies in U.S. history. Sharon managed the investigation regarding allegations of fraud, dishonesty, and misconduct by management. She also managed the investigation related to the company’s mergers and acquisitions. Our findings: Company fraudulently manipulated its financial statements for four consecutive years, and the breakdown of internal control permitted the fraud to continue undetected for that long period of time; major responsibility for the fraud and the resulting injury to the company rested with the company’s CFO; and the company’s independent auditors committed professional malpractice.

The firm was engaged by a bank group to determine the validity and collectibility of the company’s accounts receivable securing an asset based loan (ABL). Our forensic investigation, led by Sharon, identified the existence of fictitious customers and sales, as well as forged bills of lading and invoices. We helped federal investigators prove that certain officers and employees were involved in a massive worldwide fraud by identifying the issues and tracing the movement of cash to related foreign entities totaling approximately $1 billion. Our involvement resulted in the arrest of the company’s chief executive officer on charges of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud.

Our client engaged a  CohnReznick team, led by Sharon, to perform a due diligence review of the target company.Our due diligence review raised concerns about the reliability of the target’s financial statements, including the fact that the target could not provide support for a significant portion of its inventory recorded on its balance sheet and inter-company account balances on the books of the target’s parent did not reconcile to its subsidiary’s balances.As a result of these and other findings, our client was able to successfully renegotiate the purchase price of the target.