Soon – in the USA we will have Standard Business Reporting so that a public company can issue “One Report” to regulators and other interested stakeholders can this data can be extracted and shared without creating individual reports over and over again… This same principle can be applied to sustainability reporting or CSR reporting where companies are preparing many – if not hundreds of reports to interested stakeholders for natural and human capital reports for example
Non-Financial Information Disclosure What about non-financial information that securities regulators are mandating such as sustainability information or human capital? Can accountants move into this space and offer assurance services
Great article in Accounting Today about the status of XBRL adoption worldwide and its use to reduce business and regulatory reporting burdens (using Standard Business Reporting) and enhance analytics because tagged data is in a machine-readable structured format as discussed by John Turner,...
Likewise, companies have increased their commitments to ESG: Ceres research shows that among that 600 largest public companies, “nearly two-thirds have commitments to reduce greenhouse gas (gHg) emissions, half are actively managing water resources and nearly half are now actively protecting the human rights of their employees by disclosing human capital data in its financial statement reports as well
This also includes human capital data disclosure by companies including gender pay and pay ratio data including composition of boards of directors