Non-financial reporting in selected European countries

Abstract

Directive 2014/95/EU gave the EU Member States a certain flexibility when transposing it into national law. Each Member State could, therefore, decide to introduce regulations of varying degrees of stringency. According to Directive 2014/95/EU, large companies have to publish reports on the policies they implement in relation to environmental protection, social responsibility and treatment of employees, respect for human rights, anti-corruption and bribery, diversity on company boards (in terms of age, gender, educational and professional background).In order to satisfy the EU rules, the Republic of Croatia has implemented into its legislation the provisions of the Directive 2014/95/EU regarding the disclosure of certain non-financial reporting, by amending the Accounting Act. Some companies registered in Croatia have been disclosing some of the required non-financial information in their reports even before the effective date of the Direc-tive, but conducted studies conclude that there is still a room for improvements.This chapter provides a short overview of regulation of non-financial reporting in the Czech Republic as well as overview of previous research on non-financial reporting in this country. The results of the research present that few Czech companies publish standalone corporate responsi-bility report. More popular is the disclosure of non-financial information within annual financial reports but even this approach is pursued by less than half of respondents. The amount of disclosed information in annual reports is mostly up to 5 pages. 11 companies (10.38%) provide more than 5 pages of environmental information and only 7 companies (6.60%) provide more than 5 pages of social information.In Poland, the requirement to present non-financial information relating to CSR was introduced by the Accounting Act. Public trust entities are required to present in the report on the activities a separate part called “Statement on non-financial information”. In 2017, the Polish Standard of Non-Financial Information (SIN, 2017) was published to help enterprises fulfil their obligations under the EU Directive.