Lhe Council of the European Union (EU) endorsed the November 28the directive on non-financial reporting adopted by the European Parliament on November 10. Corporate social and environmental responsibility (CSR) will become a matter of standardized accounting, where ecological and societal performance will be seriously measured.
For twenty years now, in France, companies have been asked to report on something other than their financial performance. In 2001, the law on the new economic regulations (NRE law) fixed in its article 116 the obligation, for the only French companies listed on a regulated market, to report in their annual report on the way in which they take into account the social and environmental consequences of their activities.
This law instituted the concept of extra-financial reporting, but made it a sport reserved for some seven hundred large companies listed on the stock exchange. In 2010, the concept was democratized thanks to the Grenelle I and II laws which, while listing the government’s commitments in favor of ecological transition, extended the reporting obligation to all companies. more than five hundred employees with a balance sheet of more than 100 million euros. The 2014 European directive on the publication of non-financial information introduces the declaration of non-financial performance (DPEF) for all European companies with more than five hundred employees.
Today, with this Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the European Union is going further, by applying it to all companies with two hundred and fifty employees and more. All on the basis of indicators that cannot suffer from bias, concealment or bias in interpretation, since Brussels has mandated a specialized authority, the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (Efrag), to standardize the exercise.
Many benefits
Thus, when the directive is applied at the end of 2024, a manufacturer of steel for aviation, for example, will have to declare its greenhouse gas emissions, the quantities of recycled cups or its rate of disabled employees on a scope and according to a calculation method strictly identical to those of another specialized company, for example, in data centers for the hospital sector…
Multiply that by 50,000 companies in twenty-seven countries: CSR will become a data science and verification industry, as financial reporting has long been with its balance sheets, accountants, auditors and auditors.
You have 62.68% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.