Feedback to the European standard-setting proposals in the Outreach document published by the EFRAG Project Task Force on Non-financial repo

22 January 2021

Accountancy Europe appreciates the work of the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG) Project Task Force on Non-financial reporting standards (PTF NFRS). The PTF NFRS engaged in the very difficult but paramount task to provide technical advice to the European Commission (EC)1 on the possible elaboration of European non-financial reporting standards, important to achieve the ambitions of the European Green Deal (Green Deal)2.
Some non-financial information (NFI) topics such as climate change3 are urgent and need an urgent solution. This includes NFI reporting standards to enable consistent and comparable NFI reporting, which addresses the impacts of a company’s operations to the environment and society, as well as its dependencies on these issues.
We suggest considering the developments in the NFI playing field since EFRAG received the mandate from the EC to do preparatory work in view of potential European NFI standards. For example, CDP, the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB), Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) published a Statement of Intent to Work Together Towards Comprehensive Corporate Reporting4 noting their vision towards a comprehensive reporting system and how their standards could help achieve it. These organisations published a prototype climate-related financial disclosure standard5, built on their initiatives, to illustrate how to report on enterprise value creation, important for market transparency. In addition, the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation issued a consultation paper6, seeking stakeholders’ views on the role it could play in sustainability reporting.
Accountancy Europe fully supports this objective and is happy to help and collaborate with the PTF NFRS, EFRAG and the EC during this process. Europe has clearly been leading the sustainability agenda and we find the European Union’s (EU) leadership is key to achieve global NFI reporting standards for market transparency and establishing EU NFI standards important to achieve the EU public policy objectives.
Hereinafter we include some comments to the European standard-setting (ESS) proposals as provided by the PTF NFRS in the Outreach document....

Full Letter: Accountancy Europe

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