EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

442The Assurance of Corporate Sustainability Reports and the Renewed Role of Certified Auditors

Ruohonen Janne () and Kullas Helmi ()
Additional contact information
Ruohonen Janne: is Associate Professor (tenure track) of Business Law at Tampere University, Finland. He is the Director of the Master’s Program on Auditing. Ruohonen’s research interest is focused on business law, especially company law and audit law; Tampere, Finland
Kullas Helmi: B.Sc.(Econ. & Bus. Adm.) is Research Assistant of Business Law at Tampere University, Finland; Tampere, Finland

European Company and Financial Law Review, 2024, vol. 21, issue 3-4, 442-471

Abstract: The corporate sustainability reporting directive (2022/2464, CSRD) is expected to broaden its scope to include almost 50 000 companies in Europe. The directive sets two key obligations: (1) The annual management report must include information about certain sustainability subjects according to uniform standards; and (2) Sustainability reports must be controlled by an auditor or other authorized controller. This article focuses on examining the topic from an auditor’s perspective. Assuring the reliability of sustainability reports is essential to meet the objective of stakeholders getting reliable and comparable information. The aim of the article is to examine the renewed obligation to assure sustainability reporting, especially the key differences between the limited assurance level of sustainability reporting and the reasonable assurance level of statutory auditing. In addition, the article examines the narrowing of the expectation gap between the stakeholders and the actual content of assurance. If, in the future, sustainability information at the EU level is genuinely intended to be placed in the same category as the audit of financial information, then it is necessary to move from limited assurance engagements to reasonable assurance engagements. However, the issue must be carefully evaluated from the perspective of the administrative burden incurred by the companies, because it significantly increases the costs associated with the assurance of sustainability reporting for the companies. Finally, the goal is to evaluate how the assurance of sustainability reporting is regulated in Finland.443

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ecfr-2024-0013 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:eucflr:v:21:y:2024:i:3-4:p:442-471:n:1005

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ecfr/html

DOI: 10.1515/ecfr-2024-0013

Access Statistics for this article

European Company and Financial Law Review is currently edited by Heribert Hirte

More articles in European Company and Financial Law Review from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:bpj:eucflr:v:21:y:2024:i:3-4:p:442-471:n:1005