New Trends in Corporate Reporting in the Light of Sustainability

Abstract

Independently of the negative economic, social and human effects of the COVID-19 virus, sustainability is an emerging issue. The purpose of sustainability and integrated reporting is to create a holistic approach to performance measurement, bridging financial and non-financial measures based on integrated thinking that covers all the key elements of a business. Publishing these reports is a way for external communication to show a comprehensive picture. In order to prepare a good quality report, companies need to identify their stakeholders, their interests, needs and expectations while also presenting all the relevant information in a concise and structured report. In this paper, we describe the background and development of sustainability/integrated reporting in terms of its regulatory and application environment. We concluded that although there are different interests and approaches, intensifying intensions to form generally accepted and uniform regulations in sustainable reporting are existing and escalating. In this paper, we summarise the practice of companies from some EU countries in sustainability/integrated reporting. In practice, despite the common EU directive, the content, level of detailed presentation and structure of the reports of non-financial information differs from country to country and company to company, which restricts the ability to compare these reports or elements.