Quality of Sustainability Reporting: the role of Assurance

Abstract

Sustainability reporting research is becoming increasingly important. Despite the growing amount of theoretical and empirical studies on this subject, there is still ample space for further analysis. This thesis aims to investigate two particularly relevant issues in today's panorama: the quality of the report and its relationship with assurance, i.e., the revision of the content and form of the latter by appointed third parties. In today's context, in which sustainability represents a key principle, strongly felt by society in general, more and more companies decide to publish non-financial reports on their conduct in the ESG sphere. The growing number of publications, which are poorly standardized and comparable with each other, brings with it a major problem relating to the objectivity of the content, its effective adherence to corporate practice and therefore the legitimacy of the actions undertaken by the companies that publish the information. The idea behind this study is that there is a relationship between the quality level of a sustainability report and the quality with which its assurance is carried out or even the choice of requesting an audit or not, in the case of voluntary non-financial reporting. To support this, two sets of indicators will be identified: one relating to the quality of the sustainability report and one relating to the quality of assurance. Subsequently, these sets will be applied to the reports published in 2022 by a sample of European companies (STOXX Europe 600) and the obtained results will be analyzed with regard to the relationship between the two dimensions and the influence they have on each other.