The Expert’s Corner
Interview with
Murray Sayce, Technical Director of Sustainability Services, Bureau Veritas
United Kingdom
There is a lot of buzz in the media these days about Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR, and the issue of corporate accountability to stakeholders. Who are a company’s stakeholders, and why must companies now be accountable to them?
Murray Sayce: A company’s stakeholders include a broad range of groups with an interest in a company’s position and performance. These include investors of course, but also employees, consumers and clients as well as NGOs, the media and the company’s more immediate neighbours, which can be local community groups, local authorities or larger regional organizations of this kind.
What is Bureau Veritas’ Assurance of Sustainability Reporting (ASR)?
MS: It’s an evaluation procedure that uses a specified set of principles and criteria to assess the quality of a company’s sustainability and the systems, processes and competencies underpinning this. This in turn generates an assurance statement for publication within the company report that conveys our opinion of the quality of that report and the reliability and accuracy of the information it contains.
We also provide recommendations on how reporting can be improved in the future by deploying a set of assurance principles available to us through best practice standards and guidelines, all incorporated to the Bureau Veritas assurance protocol. For higher assurance levels we produce a detailed management report that the client can use as a plan to evolve its reporting (and performance) towards best practice. This in turn forms part of our own assurance scope for the future in that we will assess progress made over time. At the lower end of the scale we would provide recommendations on how the control and accuracy of data can be improved, as well as an overall opinion to stakeholders, or the reading public, as to how reliable the performance information is that is published in the CR report.
How does Bureau Veritas’ ASR fit into the overall picture of a company’s reporting requirements?
MS: Well, it can best be understood as part of a company’s triple bottom line. Triple bottom line accounting means expanding the traditional reporting framework to incorporate and integrate three main elements. The first is economic and includes reporting on sales, operating profit, dividends, R&D investment, wages and taxation. The second area can include social, health and safety performance, as well as regulatory infringements, accidents, occupational illness, employee diversity and community initiatives. The third part is essentially environmental and contains information regarding, for example, compliance, greenhouse gas emissions, energy use and reduction, biodiversity, etc.
Regarding the social and environmental, companies are now expected to decide how they intend to respond to such concerns and interested stakeholders, and to establish and allocate resources to deliver against
associated policies and commitments. How such commitments are being met must be communicated clearly and in a timely and accessible manner and thereby provide greater transparency on how they are creating value through responsible actions.
So, what are some of the benefits of ASR?
MS: Firstly, our services are innovative and focus on learning and performance improvement. We offer a combination of independent, impartial advice - through our structured assurance services portfolio - plus a flexible, tailored approach, unique to each project and dependent on emerging standards and marketplace demands. For example, we analyze our client’s sustainability strategy versus its performance, challenge its approach to risk identification and management and then provide recommendations that can be used practically in a company’s quest to create value for its stakeholders. Our assurance should also enable a company to revisit and revise its own strategy for CR, from which it will set out its commitments and targets to meet ongoing external (& internal) expectations. Our assurance clients inform their stakeholders through Sustainability /CR Reports, which can be hard copy, Web-based, or increasingly, a combination of both. If reliable and accurate this information ensures customer loyalty, employee attraction and retention, and even its marketing and public relations. A balanced report includes information relating to economic, social and environmental aspects that will portray both the good and the not-so-good elements of its performance over a given accounting period. Additional benefits are that it can lead to improvements to internal systems (for example, environmental and health/safety management systems), which in turn can lead to a myriad of internal improvements such as operational efficiency, integration opportunities, ongoing legislative compliance, etc. Where stakeholders have also been engaged in the reporting process, and sometimes the assurance process, a company can glean a better understanding of societal concerns and act accordingly. External assurance can result in inclusion in ethical investment vehicles such as the FTSE4Good (1) and the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (2).
So, ASR can help to deliver external credibility and to provide a fair and honest picture of the company’s social, environmental and ethical performance, which remains the main driver for independent assurance. It is important to understand, however, that we’re not just talking about ticking the boxes here! ASR should serve to check both that the information in the report is right and that the right information is in the report.
Why is Bureau Veritas so well placed to deliver ASR services?
MS: Our strengths are our global recognition as best practice providers, obtained through working with standards such as the AA1000 Assurance Standard (3), the ISAE3000 (4) (assurance of non-financial information) and guidelines such as the Global Reporting Initiative (5) framework, all now incorporated within Bureau Veritas’s ASR protocol. This is all built upon our credibility as a third party organization with a 180-year history of providing independent assurance services and the in-depth experience we have gained with blue chip companies across all sectors such as Nestlé, Arcelor Mittal, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and British American Tobacco. We draw upon our wide capabilities in the field of HSE Management, audit and sustainability services to assist in the management of key compliance risks. Our global network of trained and experienced assurors covers our main markets, and with a further 6,000 auditors in 140 countries we can deliver virtually anywhere in the world.
Recent confirmation of our strengths was provided by the independent analyst firm Verdantix, which issued its Green Quadrant report "How to select a CSR Assurance Provider," scoring Bureau Veritas highly across all its evaluation criteria, a result it attributes precisely to Bureau Veritas's broad and deep global capabilities.
With such depth and capacity, we can deliver solutions that reflect clients’ individual needs and combine our structured portfolio of assurance services, which we tailor to the requirements of clients at different stages in reporting maturity.
(1)The FTSE4Good Index Series has been designed to measure the performance of companies that meet globally recognised corporate responsibility standards, and to facilitate investment in those companies
(2) Launched in 1999, the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes are the first global indexes tracking the financial performance of the leading sustainability-driven companies worldwide.
(3) Accountability 1000 (AA1000) is the work of ISEA - the Institute for Social and Ethical Accountability. It is promoted as a standard for the measuring and reporting of ethical behaviour in business. It provides a framework that organisations can use to understand and improve their ethical performance, and a means for others to judge the validity of claims to be ethical.
(4) Initially released in June 2000, International Standard on Assurance Engagements (ISAE 100) was designed to provide a basic framework for large scale audits concerned with non-financial data process monitoring
(5) The Reporting Framework provides guidance on how organizations can disclose their sustainability performance
There is a lot of buzz in the media these days about Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR, and the issue of corporate accountability to stakeholders. Who are a company’s stakeholders, and why must companies now be accountable to them?
Murray Sayce: A company’s stakeholders include a broad range of groups with an interest in a company’s position and performance. These include investors of course, but also employees, consumers and clients as well as NGOs, the media and the company’s more immediate neighbours, which can be local community groups, local authorities or larger regional organizations of this kind.
What is Bureau Veritas’ Assurance of Sustainability Reporting (ASR)?
MS: It’s an evaluation procedure that uses a specified set of principles and criteria to assess the quality of a company’s sustainability and the systems, processes and competencies underpinning this. This in turn generates an assurance statement for publication within the company report that conveys our opinion of the quality of that report and the reliability and accuracy of the information it contains.
We also provide recommendations on how reporting can be improved in the future by deploying a set of assurance principles available to us through best practice standards and guidelines, all incorporated to the Bureau Veritas assurance protocol. For higher assurance levels we produce a detailed management report that the client can use as a plan to evolve its reporting (and performance) towards best practice. This in turn forms part of our own assurance scope for the future in that we will assess progress made over time. At the lower end of the scale we would provide recommendations on how the control and accuracy of data can be improved, as well as an overall opinion to stakeholders, or the reading public, as to how reliable the performance information is that is published in the CR report.
How does Bureau Veritas’ ASR fit into the overall picture of a company’s reporting requirements?
MS: Well, it can best be understood as part of a company’s triple bottom line. Triple bottom line accounting means expanding the traditional reporting framework to incorporate and integrate three main elements. The first is economic and includes reporting on sales, operating profit, dividends, R&D investment, wages and taxation. The second area can include social, health and safety performance, as well as regulatory infringements, accidents, occupational illness, employee diversity and community initiatives. The third part is essentially environmental and contains information regarding, for example, compliance, greenhouse gas emissions, energy use and reduction, biodiversity, etc.
Regarding the social and environmental, companies are now expected to decide how they intend to respond to such concerns and interested stakeholders, and to establish and allocate resources to deliver against
associated policies and commitments. How such commitments are being met must be communicated clearly and in a timely and accessible manner and thereby provide greater transparency on how they are creating value through responsible actions.
So, what are some of the benefits of ASR?
MS: Firstly, our services are innovative and focus on learning and performance improvement. We offer a combination of independent, impartial advice - through our structured assurance services portfolio - plus a flexible, tailored approach, unique to each project and dependent on emerging standards and marketplace demands. For example, we analyze our client’s sustainability strategy versus its performance, challenge its approach to risk identification and management and then provide recommendations that can be used practically in a company’s quest to create value for its stakeholders. Our assurance should also enable a company to revisit and revise its own strategy for CR, from which it will set out its commitments and targets to meet ongoing external (& internal) expectations. Our assurance clients inform their stakeholders through Sustainability /CR Reports, which can be hard copy, Web-based, or increasingly, a combination of both. If reliable and accurate this information ensures customer loyalty, employee attraction and retention, and even its marketing and public relations. A balanced report includes information relating to economic, social and environmental aspects that will portray both the good and the not-so-good elements of its performance over a given accounting period. Additional benefits are that it can lead to improvements to internal systems (for example, environmental and health/safety management systems), which in turn can lead to a myriad of internal improvements such as operational efficiency, integration opportunities, ongoing legislative compliance, etc. Where stakeholders have also been engaged in the reporting process, and sometimes the assurance process, a company can glean a better understanding of societal concerns and act accordingly. External assurance can result in inclusion in ethical investment vehicles such as the FTSE4Good (1) and the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (2).
So, ASR can help to deliver external credibility and to provide a fair and honest picture of the company’s social, environmental and ethical performance, which remains the main driver for independent assurance. It is important to understand, however, that we’re not just talking about ticking the boxes here! ASR should serve to check both that the information in the report is right and that the right information is in the report.
Why is Bureau Veritas so well placed to deliver ASR services?
MS: Our strengths are our global recognition as best practice providers, obtained through working with standards such as the AA1000 Assurance Standard (3), the ISAE3000 (4) (assurance of non-financial information) and guidelines such as the Global Reporting Initiative (5) framework, all now incorporated within Bureau Veritas’s ASR protocol. This is all built upon our credibility as a third party organization with a 180-year history of providing independent assurance services and the in-depth experience we have gained with blue chip companies across all sectors such as Nestlé, Arcelor Mittal, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and British American Tobacco. We draw upon our wide capabilities in the field of HSE Management, audit and sustainability services to assist in the management of key compliance risks. Our global network of trained and experienced assurors covers our main markets, and with a further 6,000 auditors in 140 countries we can deliver virtually anywhere in the world.
Recent confirmation of our strengths was provided by the independent analyst firm Verdantix, which issued its Green Quadrant report "How to select a CSR Assurance Provider," scoring Bureau Veritas highly across all its evaluation criteria, a result it attributes precisely to Bureau Veritas's broad and deep global capabilities.
With such depth and capacity, we can deliver solutions that reflect clients’ individual needs and combine our structured portfolio of assurance services, which we tailor to the requirements of clients at different stages in reporting maturity.
(1)The FTSE4Good Index Series has been designed to measure the performance of companies that meet globally recognised corporate responsibility standards, and to facilitate investment in those companies
(2) Launched in 1999, the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes are the first global indexes tracking the financial performance of the leading sustainability-driven companies worldwide.
(3) Accountability 1000 (AA1000) is the work of ISEA - the Institute for Social and Ethical Accountability. It is promoted as a standard for the measuring and reporting of ethical behaviour in business. It provides a framework that organisations can use to understand and improve their ethical performance, and a means for others to judge the validity of claims to be ethical.
(4) Initially released in June 2000, International Standard on Assurance Engagements (ISAE 100) was designed to provide a basic framework for large scale audits concerned with non-financial data process monitoring
(5) The Reporting Framework provides guidance on how organizations can disclose their sustainability performance
