The creation of the ISSB : an analysis of supportive comment letters

The creation of the ISSB : an analysis of supportive comment letters

Bohn, Luciano

URI: http://www.repositorio.jesuita.org.br/handle/UNISINOS/12554

Fecha: 2023-04-24

xmlui.dri2xhtml.METS-1.0.item-contributorAdvisor: Kronbauer, Clovis Antônio

Resumen:

Sustainability reporting is currently a voluntary mainstream practice of companies worldwide, and defining which organisation sets international sustainability reporting standards is a complex process which requires debate, public observation, and participation. This exploratory archival research was designed to analyse 577 comment letters, submitted to the IFRS Foundation’s public consultation in 2020, concerning the creation of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). The focus was on identifying the key supportive arguments in the answers, to question 2 of the questionnaire proposed in the Foundation’s consultation paper, about the creation of the ISSB. The corpus entailed 393 supportive comment letters, which represent 68% of letters, while 31% were opposed and 1% were neutral. Both manual and computer-aided content analyses were conducted, based on the perspectives of Krippendorff, Weber, Saldaña and Mayring. The computational analysis employed Python, machine learning, Natural Language Processing, Sentiment Analysis, and BLOOM-560m. The key supportive arguments that legitimised the establishment of the ISSB are: the Foundation can mobilise the appropriate mechanisms to make sustainability standards mandatory; the Foundation’s expertise in developing accounting standards could be used to set sustainability standards; the Foundation has the best governance structure for the role; and both financial and sustainability reporting should be under the same institutional scope (The Foundation), to create a link between the reports. It was also found that the creation of the ISSB only partially met the calls for the harmonisation of international standards, since sustainability information, that is not related to investors’ needs and enterprise value creation, will still need to be reported through other frameworks, that encompass a broader perspective, such as those adopted by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG). It is expected that this research can both offer scientific subsidies to qualify professional accounting organisations that provide guidance on accounting procedures, as well as contribute to the advancement of academic research on the newly formed ISSB. It can be inferred that, although the creation of the ISSB is an important step towards the standardisation of sustainability reports, there is still a lot of ground to cover in the ongoing debate on sustainability reporting standards.

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