Assurance Providers’ Challenges for Sustainability Reporting

The Corporate Sustainability Reporting (CSR) Directive issued in 2022 has made compulsory the assurance of the sustainability reports for undertakings falling into its scope, while the previous Non-Financial Reporting Directive left to Member States the option to implement or not such obligation. Assurance on environmental and social information is therefore deemed fundamental by the European Union to increase the level of credibility, transparency, accountability, and confidence of sustainability information. This change will develop the assurance market for sustainability information. Nonetheless, there is uncertainty on the readiness of auditors and audit firms to this new market demand and the quality of assurance statements is sometimes contested by the literature. Past research has mainly focused on the assurance standards, their implementation and impacts of the perceived quality of sustainability reports, while the key professional features that shall help auditors provide reliable and mindfulness assurance reports are under investigated. Consequently, this paper aims to understand what are the features that auditors are developing and exhibiting to offer a reliable assurance service on sustainability reporting and what are the features that auditors are asked to exhibit to companies when performing their activity. This topic is addressed adopting a qualitative approach and relying on semi-structured interviews with auditors. Possible findings from the analysis are described in the extended abstract.