Sustainability Reporting and Assurance: The Role of Auditors in Verifying Corporate Environmental and Social Performance

Abstract

Sustainability reporting has become one of the requirements of organizations, especially in the growing concern of the company’s responsibility towards the environment and society, which plays the role of a fundamental tool for comprehensive disclosure of the ESG performance. This paper examines the increasing description and involvement of auditors with regard to the assurance of sustainability reports, highlighting the value that they bring to the process and objective of increasing the reliability, trustworthiness, and stewardship of sustainability information. The research looks into the procedures followed by the auditors in the processes of confirming environmental and social performance indicators, the rules governing assurance activities, and the difficulties encountered in striving for global comparability of performance reporting. Besides, it looks at the role of third-party assurance in enhancing investor trust, reducing the phenomenon of greenwashing, and pursuing sustainable organizational objectives in the long run. Examples and findings of existing literature and research with respect to superior benchmarks and novel phenomena in sustainability assurance are discussed in this paper. As such, the research reinforces the call for sustainability assurance to be central to conventional auditing frameworks and for the enablement of greater interaction between auditors, legal bodies and corporations in order to deliver robust and measurable ESG performances.