Accountants advising on cross-border merger reviews engaged with the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation are increasingly using AI to draft client briefings on transaction-screening obligations, prepare partner-level summaries of the failing firm defence evidentiary standard, and validate operative-section citations against the OECD text before signing financial-suitability opinions or transaction-cost reviews.
The RLB Specialist Panel put a set of practitioner-grade questions on the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation to two frontier AI models with web search active. Each question is prepared by the Panel based on the workflows that accountants actually use AI for under the OECD's 2025 revision of the Recommendation of the Council on Merger Review (OECD/LEGAL/0333). The Panel then binds every AI response to verbatim regulator-issued source text held as primary substrate. On the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation, the AI subjects returned a single hallucinated answer for accountants, in the form of Inter-Alia-to-Closed-Test Conversion.
For accountants advising on cross-border merger transactions that engage the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation, the operative-section structure of the Recommendation, the failing-firm-defence evidentiary standard, and the Council-reporting cadence drive transaction-suitability opinions, due-diligence reports, and inter-agency-engagement memos. A financial-suitability opinion that frames the failing-firm-defence under a closed three-condition cumulative test produces wrong client guidance on whether the defence is worth running and on what evidence to commission. A transaction-cost review that mis-states the operative section count signals to the partner and to the client that the underlying regulatory map is unreliable, which puts the entire engagement at risk.
The published Specialist Panel findings carry the following citation identifiers:
RLB-H-INT-OECD-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-Q005-Opus47 (Failing firm defence: mischaracterised condition 3 and closed-list error)RLB-H-INT-OECD-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-Q005-Sonnet46 (Failing firm defence: mischaracterised condition 3 and closed-list error)This is the consolidated view of findings. Click the Citation IDs or 'see details →' on any item for the full details for each finding.
An Accountants (CA/PA) advising on a distressed cross-border target who relies on this AI response will brief the client, and potentially local competition counsel, that condition 3 requires proof the target's assets would exit the market absent the merger, when the 2025 Recommendation actually requires proof that the asset exit would cause more harm to competition than the merger itself. The distinction is not cosmetic: it determines the economic analysis that must be commissioned, the evidentiary package that must be prepared, and whether the defence is worth running at all on the specific facts.
The dropped 'inter alia' qualifier compounds this by leading the practitioner to present the three conditions as a closed test, leaving the client unprepared for additional evidentiary requirements that member state authorities may impose. If the opinion is issued across multiple OECD jurisdictions and the defence subsequently fails, the professional liability exposure attaches to the signed advice, not to the AI tool that generated the first draft.
Every finding on this page compares an AI subject's account of the rule against the regulator's verbatim text from the regulator's own portal. Both are linked. Each delta, its root causes, and impact analysis are documented and published with immutable Citation IDs.