Forvis Mazars Expands Healthcare Advisory with Innova Acquisition

The Firm

CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA, Forvis Mazars was created through the June 2024 combination of FORVIS, one of the largest U.S. accounting and advisory firms, and Mazars, an internationally integrated professional services firm based in Paris with operations across more than 100 countries. FORVIS itself was the product of a 2022 merger between BKD and Dixon Hughes Goodman, two respected regional firms. The combined Forvis Mazars generates approximately $5 billion in global revenue and employs roughly 40,000 professionals worldwide, with 7,000 team members in the United States headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Forvis Mazars US CEO Tom Watson has emphasized the firm’s commitment to expanding healthcare advisory capabilities as a strategic priority. The firm provides assurance, tax, and consulting services across a wide range of industries, with healthcare consistently identified as a core focus area. The firm’s branded promise of an Unmatched Client Experience reflects its positioning as a consultative, relationship-driven advisory firm rather than a high-volume audit factory.

The firm is ranked among the largest public accounting firms in the United States and operates through a structure that maintains the legacy strengths of both FORVIS and Mazars while integrating their capabilities under a single global brand. The Mazars partnership provides international reach across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, while the FORVIS platform provides deep U.S. middle-market expertise in healthcare, financial services, construction, and government sectors.

The Innova Group Acquisition

In March 2026, Forvis Mazars acquired The Innova Group, a healthcare consulting firm based in Austin, Texas, that advises hospitals and health systems nationwide. The acquisition added nine executives, nearly 50 professionals, and a new office in Tucson, Arizona, with additional professionals joining existing Forvis Mazars offices in Austin, Chicago, and Dallas. Innova employees include clinicians, physician advisors, and former hospital executives who bring operational expertise to the firm’s healthcare consulting platform.

David Tate, managing partner of healthcare consulting at Forvis Mazars US, described the Innova acquisition as adding strategy, finance, and facility planning capabilities that complement the firm’s existing healthcare offerings. The combined capabilities provide a full suite of consulting services across the entire continuum of care, enabling engagement with health system leaders on operational improvement, strategic planning, and transaction advisory.

The Innova acquisition is significant for ABA transaction advisory because it deepens Forvis Mazars’s healthcare operational expertise, the kind of clinical and operational knowledge that is increasingly important in behavioral health due diligence where clinical model assessment, supervision compliance, and care delivery efficiency are central to deal evaluation.

Forvis Mazars’s March 2026 acquisition of The Innova Group, bringing clinicians, physician advisors, and former hospital executives into the firm, deepens the healthcare operational expertise that is increasingly critical for behavioral health transaction advisory.

Transaction Advisory Capabilities

Forvis Mazars’s Transaction Advisory practice has completed due diligence engagements on billions of dollars in transactions across a wide range of industries, according to the firm. The team combines 20-plus years of experience with industry intelligence designed for impact in the middle market. The firm provides buy-side due diligence, sell-side due diligence, transaction tax advisory, and post-close advisory services.

The firm’s buy-side due diligence is flexible and tailored to specific deal needs, with scope designed around the buyer’s thesis of the company’s value drivers. Typical areas of focus include quality of earnings assessment, working capital analysis, cash flow sustainability, revenue trend analysis, and identification of non-recurring items. For sell-side engagements, Forvis Mazars helps sellers anticipate risks from the buyer’s perspective and prepare information that is clear, credible, and accurate.

The firm’s transaction tax practice integrates with buy-side and sell-side due diligence engagements to evaluate federal, state, local, sales and use, and international tax exposures. For multi-state ABA platforms, transaction tax diligence evaluates successor tax liability risks, optimal post-closing organizational structures, and deal consequence modeling across corporate, LLC, and partnership entity types.

Forvis Mazars also provides post-close advisory services including assurance, tax, valuation, and consulting for acquired businesses. This continuity from pre-close diligence through post-close advisory ensures that the relationships and institutional knowledge developed during the transaction process are preserved and leveraged during the integration and hold periods.

Healthcare Consulting Platform

Forvis Mazars’s healthcare consulting practice encompasses revenue cycle management, clinical documentation and coding, strategic planning and finance, performance improvement, and healthcare IT advisory. The firm helps healthcare organizations improve cash flow, efficiency, and patient satisfaction through revenue cycle optimization, and supports revenue integrity through clinical documentation improvement tailored to each organization’s structure and compliance challenges.

The firm’s healthcare strategy and finance practice helps clients evaluate mergers, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships to build alignment and structures for achieving organizational goals. This capability directly supports transaction advisory for healthcare services M&A, including ABA platform acquisitions where the strategic rationale often involves geographic expansion, service line diversification, or payer mix optimization.

Forvis Mazars publishes the Mindsets Healthcare Executive Leadership Report, an annual research publication that surveys healthcare executives on strategic priorities, operational challenges, and market dynamics. This thought leadership positions the firm as a trusted advisor to healthcare organizations and provides the market intelligence that informs its transaction advisory work when evaluating acquisition targets in the healthcare services sector.

Where Forvis Mazars Fits in ABA M&A

Forvis Mazars occupies a growing position in the middle-market healthcare transaction advisory landscape. The firm’s 7,000-professional U.S. platform, healthcare consulting depth, and expanding transaction advisory capabilities position it as a viable alternative to established mid-market competitors like RSM, BDO, and Grant Thornton for healthcare due diligence mandates. The Innova acquisition and ongoing investment in healthcare consulting signal a firm that is actively building toward a more comprehensive healthcare advisory offering.

For ABA transactions specifically, Forvis Mazars’s combination of transaction advisory experience, revenue cycle expertise, clinical documentation assessment capabilities, and healthcare strategic planning creates a foundation for behavioral health due diligence. The firm’s emphasis on a consultative, flexible approach to buy-side diligence, tailored to the buyer’s investment thesis rather than a standardized template, is well suited to ABA platform evaluation where deal-specific factors such as Medicaid payer mix, state regulatory environment, clinical model design, and workforce dynamics vary significantly across targets.

The FORVIS legacy, built from BKD and Dixon Hughes Goodman, two firms with deep roots in the South and Southeast, gives the combined firm particular strength in regions where ABA provider activity has grown rapidly. Texas, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas are all significant ABA markets, and Forvis Mazars’s historical presence in these states provides local market knowledge and professional networks relevant to ABA transaction advisory.

Forvis Mazars’s legacy strength in Southern and Southeastern markets, regions where ABA provider activity has grown rapidly, combined with its expanding healthcare consulting platform, positions the firm for increasing relevance in behavioral health transaction advisory.

Forvis Mazars’s strategic planning practice helps healthcare organizations evaluate market positioning, service line viability, and growth opportunities. For ABA targets, this strategic evaluation encompasses market density analysis, competitive assessment, geographic expansion feasibility, and payer diversification potential, the commercial dimensions of deal evaluation that complement the financial QofE and help PE buyers understand whether the target’s growth trajectory is achievable.

The firm’s data analytics capabilities, deployed through its transaction advisory and healthcare consulting practices, enable the processing and analysis of large datasets including claims data, clinical records, and financial transactions. For ABA platform due diligence involving thousands of Medicaid claims across multiple states, these analytical tools accelerate pattern recognition, anomaly detection, and trend analysis that would be time-prohibitive with manual review alone.

Forvis Mazars’s clinical documentation improvement capabilities, assessing whether clinical records accurately support billing codes and reimbursement claims, are directly relevant to the compliance dimension of ABA due diligence. The HHS Office of Inspector General’s ABA audit series has consistently found documentation deficiencies as a primary driver of improper payments. A diligence advisor with clinical documentation expertise can evaluate whether a target’s documentation practices meet federal and state requirements, and, equally important, whether the target has the training and quality assurance infrastructure to maintain compliance after acquisition.

The firm’s revenue cycle management expertise is a significant differentiator for ABA transaction advisory. Forvis Mazars helps healthcare organizations optimize cash flow, improve collection efficiency, and maintain revenue integrity through clinical documentation and coding assessment. For ABA providers, where revenue recognition depends on Medicaid authorization management, claims submission accuracy, and denial resolution processes, revenue cycle diligence is often as important as traditional financial statement analysis in determining the sustainability of reported earnings.

Forvis Mazars’s healthcare consulting practice includes workforce advisory services that help healthcare providers manage increasing demands for an efficient workforce. In the ABA sector, where BCBA and RBT workforce shortages constrain capacity and directly affect revenue generation potential, the firm’s workforce advisory capabilities are directly relevant to evaluating whether a target’s staffing model is sustainable and whether post-acquisition workforce expansion plans are realistic given local labor market conditions.

Key Considerations for ABA Stakeholders

For ABA practice owners in Southern and Southeastern markets, Forvis Mazars represents a healthcare-focused advisory firm with deep regional roots and a growing transaction advisory platform. Owners in Texas, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas may find that Forvis Mazars’s local market presence and healthcare consulting relationships provide a comfortable advisory relationship for sell-side preparation and due diligence support.

For PE sponsors, Forvis Mazars is an emerging middle-market option for ABA due diligence, a firm that is actively investing in healthcare advisory capabilities and building the kind of clinical and operational depth that behavioral health transactions increasingly require. The firm’s flexible, thesis-driven approach to buy-side diligence aligns with how PE sponsors evaluate ABA targets.

For the ABA industry, Forvis Mazars’s trajectory, a newly combined global firm investing in healthcare consulting acquisitions and building transaction advisory capabilities, reflects the broader pattern of professional services firms recognizing behavioral health as a growth market that warrants dedicated investment and specialized expertise.

The firm’s emphasis on data analytics in transaction advisory reflects a broader trend toward technology-enabled due diligence that is reshaping how advisory firms evaluate healthcare targets. Forvis Mazars has noted that data analytics is an essential tool for making informed and strategic decisions in mergers and acquisitions. For ABA transactions involving thousands of Medicaid claims across multiple states, payers, and service codes, the ability to process and analyze these datasets computationally, rather than through manual sampling, provides a more comprehensive and defensible basis for diligence conclusions about revenue sustainability, billing compliance, and clinical documentation adequacy.

Forvis Mazars’s formation from the FORVIS and Mazars combination creates a firm with both deep U.S. middle-market expertise and genuine international reach. While the Big Four firms also offer global networks, their U.S. practices are often oriented toward large-cap transactions. Forvis Mazars’s U.S. practice retains the middle-market orientation of its FORVIS legacy while gaining access to Mazars’ international capabilities in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. This combination of middle-market focus and global reach is distinctive in the professional services market and positions the firm for cross-border healthcare transactions as the behavioral health sector gradually internationalizes.

Forvis Mazars’s trajectory since its June 2024 formation has been one of rapid capability expansion through both organic investment and strategic acquisitions. The Innova Group acquisition in March 2026 was the most visible example, but the firm has also expanded across other service areas and geographies. For ABA stakeholders, this trajectory signals a firm that is actively building the healthcare advisory infrastructure needed to compete for behavioral health due diligence mandates, and that is likely to continue investing in clinical, operational, and transaction advisory capabilities specific to the behavioral health sector.

The Innova Group acquisition represents a deliberate strategy to differentiate Forvis Mazars in the healthcare consulting market through clinical depth. While many accounting firms offer healthcare transaction advisory as a financial analysis function, Innova brings clinicians, physician advisors, and former hospital executives who understand healthcare operations from the provider perspective. This clinical expertise is particularly valuable in behavioral health due diligence, where understanding treatment protocols, staffing models, supervision requirements, and clinical quality metrics requires knowledge that financial analysts alone may not possess.

Forvis Mazars’s revenue cycle management expertise addresses one of the most complex dimensions of ABA provider economics. The firm helps healthcare organizations optimize cash flow, improve claims processing efficiency, and reduce denial rates, all areas where ABA providers face significant operational challenges. For PE buyers evaluating ABA targets, a diligence provider that can assess revenue cycle health at the operational level, not just the financial statement level, provides a more complete picture of the target’s true earnings power and cash conversion characteristics.

The FORVIS legacy firms, BKD and Dixon Hughes Goodman, built particularly strong practices in Southern and Southeastern states including Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. These are among the largest and fastest-growing ABA markets in the country, driven by favorable Medicaid reimbursement environments, growing autism prevalence, and expanding insurance mandate coverage. A firm with deep regional relationships and market knowledge in these states has a natural advantage in understanding the competitive dynamics, regulatory environments, and payer landscapes that shape ABA provider economics.

Forvis Mazars’s global network, comprising approximately 40,000 professionals operating in more than 100 countries, provides cross-border capabilities that are increasingly relevant as PE sponsors explore international behavioral health expansion opportunities. While ABA remains primarily a U.S. market, the growing adoption of evidence-based behavioral interventions in international markets, particularly in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Middle East, creates potential for cross-border transaction advisory engagements where a global network provides meaningful value.

AT A GLANCE

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