The filed complaint alleges that defendants made false statements and/or concealed that: (a) Syneos’s business development capabilities had been materially impaired by workforce reductions and leadership and operational changes, as well as labor force turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic; (b) Syneos had struggled to integrate recent acquisitions, causing the Company to suffer from a bloated and confused organizational structure and impairing the Company’s ability to provide comprehensive or effective customer engagement across its product portfolio; (c) Syneos was suffering from acute competitive disadvantages as clinical trials moved to remote monitoring and decentralized administration, as the Company lacked the tools possessed by some of its rivals to successfully run remote and decentralized trials, such as certain data visualization and statistical modeling capabilities, and the Company had failed to adapt to changing business demands in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic; (d) Syneos’s backlog, book-to-bill ratios, and net new business awards had been artificially inflated by more than $500 million through the inclusion of reimbursable expenses that the Company would never collect; (e) as a result of (a)-(d) above, Syneos was struggling to execute on its existing contracts and to agilely respond to its client needs, causing the Company to suffer client dissatisfaction across its client base; and (f) as a result of (a)-(e) above, Syneos was exposed to a material undisclosed risk that the Company would lose customers, be unable to grow its client base or win significant contract renewals, and cede market share to its rivals.