Are You Ready for Global Sustainability Reporting - GUEST POST by Tom Hood, Exec. Dir. & CEO, MACPA

NOTE: While I am on vacation, I invited some guest posts from popular bloggers. Following is a guest post from Tom Hood, Executive Director and CEO of the Maryland Association of CPAs (MACPA). Together with Bill Sheridan of MACPA, in addition to the many other hats he wears in the MACPA and national acccounting community, Tom is coauthor of various MACPA Blogs, including CPA Success. Tom's guest post follows.

On Monday 2nd August 2010, the formation of the International Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC) was announced. Led by Prince Charles and The Prince’s Accounting for Sustainability Project (A4S) and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) in an attempt to add a globally accepted set of standards for accounting for sustainability. The website http://www.integratedreporting.org/ states the intent of this new organization as follows:

“The IIRC has been created to respond to the need for a concise, clear, comprehensive and comparable integrated reporting framework structured around the organization’s strategic objectives, its governance and business model and integrating both material financial and non-financial information.

The objectives for an integrated reporting framework are to:
a. support the information needs of long-term investors, by showing the broader and longer-term consequences of decision-making;

b. reflect the interconnections between environmental, [NOTE A] social, governance and financial factors in decisions that affect long-term performance and condition, making clear the link between sustainability and economic value;

c. provide the necessary framework for environmental [NOTE A] and social factors to be taken into account systematically in reporting and decision-making;

d. rebalance performance metrics away from an undue emphasis on short-term financial performance; and

e. bring reporting closer to the information used by management to run the business on a day-to-day basis.”

This is clearly another form of global convergence as the European community has led the world in “sustainability reporting”.

NOTE A (Editor's note - see also front page story by Justin Gillis in Sunday Aug. 16 New York Times: In Weather Chaos, A Case for Global Warming.)

NOTE B: (Editor's note: see also our Jan. 27 post: SEC Votes to Issue Interpretive Guidance on Climate Change Disclosures)

If you are interested in being considered as a guest blogger during my vacation in August, please contact me at eorenstein@financialexecutives.org

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