Insights
The most underestimated fact in sustainability reporting is that the numbers now have to be assured. Under the European standards, and increasingly elsewhere, an external party will test your sustainability data, your methods and your controls to a standard much closer to financial audit than to a sustainability narrative. Teams that have reported sustainability information for years, comfortably and without challenge, are often unprepared for what changes when it becomes assurable, and they discover the gap in their first assurance cycle, when it is expensive to close.
By Christopher Fagan
Sustainability reporting grew up as a communications activity. Data was gathered, often manually, from many sources, presented well, and rarely questioned rigorously. Assurance changes the game entirely. An assurer does not accept a number because it is presented confidently. They ask where it came from, how it was calculated, what controls sat around it and what evidence supports it. Data that was fine for a report is not necessarily fine for assurance.
Every reported figure needs a clear trail back to source, with the calculation and supporting evidence retained. The most common assurance finding is not a wrong number, it is a number that cannot be evidenced.
Assurable data has to be produced with proper control: defined ownership, documented method, and checks along the way. Data assembled by one person in a spreadsheet each year, however diligent, does not meet that bar.
How each metric is defined, bounded, estimated and calculated has to be written down and applied consistently. Judgement is allowed, but it has to be documented and defensible, not held in someone’s head.
Closing an evidence or control gap during a live assurance engagement is slow and expensive, and it puts the reporting deadline at risk. Closing it beforehand is routine.
The organisations that find assurance painful are almost always the ones that treated it as a final step rather than a design principle. Build the reporting to be assurable from the start and assurance is straightforward. Bolt assurance onto reporting that was never designed for it and it is not. See sustainability assurance readiness.
Get in touch to prepare for assurance before your provider arrives.
If any of this is live for you right now, the senior people who wrote it are the people you would work with.