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A very important factor for sustainable development is a balance between the exploitation of natural resources for socio-economic development, and conserving ecosystem services that are critical to everyone’s wellbeing and livelihoods. The strategical importance of ecosystem services is set by the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005, which put ecosystem services firmly on the policy agenda and the EU Biodiversity Strategy, which states that “Member States must map and assess the state of ecosystems and their services in their national territory by 2014, assess the economic value of such services, and promote the integration of these values into accounting and reporting systems at EU and national level by 2020”. The aim of the paper is to present and discuss the approach of ecosystem services assessment for sustainable land use and strategical development scenarios. The paper will focus on the role of ecosystem services in development and spatial planning, and this approach can be integrated in planning processes and decision making. There will be presented a case study for two coastal territories in Latvia, where an ecosystem services assessment was implemented and sequentially different development scenarios considered and analysed.

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The article discusses current issues of interaction between external auditors and management of public interest entities with the aim of making managerial decisions aimed at ensuring the continuity of an entity, ensuring balance between resources and their sources, eliminating distortions in financial statements. Based on the study, it has been found that the definition of «public interest» is inextricably linked with the economic benefits of interested financial statements users. Internal control (audit) is aimed at prompt response to negative effects of economic activity. Considering financial performance generally, external audit provides users with reliable information on financial and property status of the audited entity, its financial results, and changes in cash flow and equity. Management team of a public interest entity has to create an audit committee to interact with an external auditor. At the same time, an external auditor creates an additional report and informs the audit committee on the applied principles of independence, on the key partner, on the auditors involved, on the scope and timing of the statutory audit, on the audit methodology, the materiality level chosen for the audit, on business continuity of the audited entity, on the shortcomings of its quality control system, on identified violations of the law, and on the interaction of auditors and management during the audit. A letter from the auditor to those with the highest managerial authority also contains information about the internal control system and its ability to identify deviations from legislative norms. A final document informing report users on financial and property status, operating activity, cash flow and equity statements of the audited entity is an audit report, which may include the following opinions of an auditor: unqualified opinion, qualified opinion, adverse opinion, and disclaimer of opinion. The management of the audited entity makes decisions on adjusting internal control system, financial statements, and revealed deviations from legislative norms based on audit documents preceding the report and the audit report itself. The procedure for adjusting the customer's internal control system of the audit, its financial statements identified during the inspection of deviations from existing legislative standards on the basis of audit documents preceding the audit report and an additional report for the audit committee of the enterprise is considered.

People with disabilities are a largely untapped employment resource in many countries. About 48.5% of people with disabilities are employed in the European Union (EU), compared with only 24.4% in Latvia. Although there has been some progress on employing disabled people in Latvia, as the statistical facts and figures show, the problem still remains. This paper investigates how developing disability management in the workplace could open the possibilities for work for people with disabilities. It can be matched with the opportunities to increase the employment rate according to the European Disability Strategy (2010–2020) objectives, as well as fighting against social exclusion and allowing practical implementation of the United Convention on the rights of this group of people in Latvia. The aim of this research is to analyse the employment problems for people with disabilities and investigate disability management trends in Latvia. The main findings of this research are as follows: 1) people with disabilities are not considered as a prospective labour force by employers, 2) Latvian companies generally play a passive role in recruiting disabled people, especially those who have never had work experience with disabled people, 3) employers think that they do not receive state institutions’ interest and support to encourage them to employ people with disabilities. The disability management is developing, although it shows quite slow movement in understanding people with disabilities as a valuable human resource.