Sustainable Development and Assurance of Corporate Social Responsibility Reports Published by Ibex‐35 Companies

Abstract

Spain is the world's leading country as regards corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting (KPMG, 2011). In addition, Spain is taking new initiatives with regard to environmental policy, sustainable development, and stakeholder engagement in accordance with Law 2/2011.This is why we choose Spain as the setting to analyze whether the determinants for external assurance posited by existing literature (industry, size, profitability, leverage) have an impact on the decision of companies to assure their CSR reports. Our study is a pioneer in the sense that it investigates the possible links between the auditor of the annual report and the provider of assurance. The results of this study indicate that assurance of CSR reporting depends on the size, leverage, and profitability of the company. We find that the sustainability assurance market is dominated by the Big‐4 firms, who develop different strategies in this field. Finally, we find that the decision to hire an auditor to perform sustainability assurance sometimes depends on the industry. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Sustainability Assurance in Socially-Sensitive Sectors: A Worldwide Analysis of the Financial Services Industry

“…We found a significant association between adoption of assurance and size (p < 0.05), with large companies and MNEs being less likely to assure their sustainability reports than SMEs. This finding differs from the general behaviour, which reflects that the likelihood that adopting assurance is higher for large companies [4,5,45,63,64,66]. We also found that adoption of assurance is significantly associated with the use of the sector supplement (p < 0.05), with companies using the financial services supplement more likely to adopt assurance.…”

“…In contrast, Castelo Branco et al [64] indicated that listed companies were less likely to assure their sustainability reports. In relation to the company size, several authors found that larger companies were more likely to adopt assurance (see, for example, [4,5,45,63,64,66]). On the contrary, Cho et al [65] did not find that size was associated with adoption of assurance.…”

“…Fernández-Feijoó-Souto et al [45] found that the likelihood of choosing big accounting providers was higher for companies from more visible sectors. Sierra et al [66] found that sectors, such as oil and energy, basic materials or financial services, significantly tended to choose accounting firms as assurance providers. At country-level, Simnet et al [4] found that companies from stakeholder-oriented countries were more likely to choose large accounting firms as assurance providers.…”

The Relationship between Femininity and Sustainability Reporting

“…In fact, there are industries with high environmental impacts, so called environmentally-sensitive industries, and industries have a high political visibility because they have greater proximity to consumers, investors or employees (FernandezFeijoo et al, 2012). Consequently, the companies of environmentally-sensitive industries disclose more CSR information and their reports are externally assured in more proportion than companies installed in other industries because they seek the acceptance of their activities from stakeholders (Brammer & Pavelin, 2008;Kolk & Perego, 2010;Moroney et al, 2012;Toppinen et al 2012;Sierra et al, 2013;Alonso-Almeida et al, 2014). Thus, Industry1 is a control variable that measures the percentage of GRI reports disclosed by the high-risk industries over the total GRI reports by country and year.…”

The Current Conditions of CSR Implementation in Construction Industry: A Lesson From Taiwan

“…They have gradually published reports on their charity donations and their activities of reducing pollutants, wastes, carbon emissions and energy consumption. According to Sierra et al (2012) Hernandez (2015) argues that, among contractors, developers and suppliers, contractors have the best performance in sustainable operation and development. As defined by Perrini et al (2003), corporate sustainability refers to the ability of a company to sustain its operation for a very long period of time and this ability depends on good relationships between the company and its stakeholders.…”