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Assurance over sustainability reporting : the case of Belgium

Hannesse, Gilles
(2015)

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Details

Supervisors
Decaux, Loïc
Faculty
Louvain School of Management
Degree label
Master [120] en sciences de gestion
Abstract
This paper focuses on the assurance over sustainability reporting in the context of the Belgian companies. First, we did a literature review where we try to understand the concept of sustainability reporting, of the assurance, the main assurance providers, the role of the Big Four firms and what has been done in Belgium until now. Then we found out that it could be interesting to answer to the following research questions: RQ1: Why does a Big 4 audit firm used as the external auditor for the review of financial statement should also provide assurance over sustainability reporting for the same organization?  Why shouldn’t it be more suitable from an independent point of view that financial statements are audited by one of the Big 4 and sustainability reporting by another Big 4? RQ2: Why are Big 4 firms better than the other assurance providers? RQ3: What are the similarities and differences between providing assurance over financial statement and sustainability reporting? RQ 4: How positively is the impact of a Big 4 firm on the level of assurance (limited or reasonable) in the company sustainability reporting? How does the company choose the level of assurance? We conducted interviews with 6 Belgian companies and all Big Four companies in order to answer to these questions. We found out that the Big Four and the Belgian companies didn’t have the same opinion about the different questions. At the end, we were able to sum up the main ideas of everyone in order to fill up the gap left by the previous research and provide an insight about the Belgian companies.

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Hannesse, G. (2015). Assurance over sustainability reporting : the case of Belgium. https://dial-mem.test.bib.ucl.ac.be/handle/2078.2/7583