Assurance on non-financial information in Spain

Abstract

By means of the Directive 2014/95/EU, the EU established new requirements regarding the disclosure of non-financial information (NFI). The Spanish Act 11/2018 expands these requirements, imposing mandatory external assurance on NFI. This is a pioneering study in Spain, since it was conducted during the first year in which external assurance is mandatory. The aim of this paper is to analyse whether Spanish listed companies fulfil this requirement and to compare assurance practices before the entry into force of the Act and afterwards. Our findings indicate that some companies still fail to adopt external assurance in spite of being mandatory. We found no significant association between the choice of type of assuror and the entry into force of the Act, but this choice depends on some corporate characteristics. On the other hand, we found that the Act implementation and the type of assuror are associated with some assurance features.