ABSTRACT: (ASSURING THE SUSTAINABILITY REPORTS. AN ANALYSIS OF ITALIAN LISTED COMPANIES). During the last years, worldwide companies have paid increasing attention to corporate responsibility issues and CSR Reports, trying to leverage on their potential benefits toward company value creation. This value is strictly linked to the information reliability and the trust that they can generate among investors, stakeholders and markets. However, most organizations are still ignoring or under valuating the benefits they can leverage on by acting in a socially responsible way, and this is mainly due to the difficulties in measuring the CSR-related benefits. Assuming that these potential benefits do exist, the purpose of this paper, in this sense, is to investigate how Italian listed companies are approaching the phenomenon of corporate social disclosure assurance. In order to do so, a sample of 99 Italian listed companies was selected, over a longitudinal period of 15 years, to investigate some of the most recent trends in the use of CSR reports and assurance practices. For each company our model considers: (a) sector; (b) the existence of the sustaiability report; (c) adopted CSR standard; (d) sustainability report’s assuror; (e) financial report’s assuror; (f) assurance standard and (g) level of assurance. The use of sustainability report dislcosure and CSR assurance has been increasingly discussed by scholar, but this is one of the few empirical studies dedicated to this topic. Despite the increasing importance recognized by companies, all over the world, to Sustainability and Social disclosure assurance, it seems relatively under-researched in the academic arena and our contribution aims to fill this gap, at least in relation to the Italian market. We found evidence that the companies listed in the Italian Stock Exchange Market are more and more interested in preparing and assuring their Sustainability Reports, often calling the Annual Report assuror. These evidences are consistent with the international trends monitored by literature about CSR and assurance. Moreover, our results show that accountancy firms lead the market for CSR assurance and that the most used standards are AA1000 and ISAE3000. This trend seems to confirm what is happening across the globe, where convergence toward given standards appears to be the key for easier and clearer reporting processes and for increasing in stakeholders’ trust.
KEYWORDS: sustainability report, assurance, volountary disclosure.
