Exam 34: Accounting for Corporate Social Responsibility

Discuss initiatives taken by the mining industry to improve their corporate social-responsibility reporting.

According to Gray,Owen and Adams,accountability involves:

According to Environment Australia,public environmental reporting is the communication of environmental position information by an organisation to its shareholders.

Discuss the objectives for an integrated reporting framework.

The Global Reporting Initiative has suggested alternative views of the application of the materiality concept in social and environmental accounting,including:

A specific Australian requirement for companies to provide environmental information in their annual reports is available in AASB 137 Provisions,Contingent Liabilities and Contingent Assets.

The traditional accounting model focuses on property rights and market transactions and so tends to treat environmental goods such as air and water as being free and therefore not assets,expenses or revenues that need to be reported.

Discuss the motivations for entities to voluntarily report their performance with respect to social and environmental impacts.

AccountAbility's work is the AA1000 series of standard which is based on the following principle:

There is significant diversity in the approaches adopted to disclose social and environmental information.Examples of broad approaches adopted include:

Milton Friedman expressed the view in his book,Capitalism and Freedom,that:

The view of the Australian Industry Group about community accountability,including environmental reporting,is that:

The traditional view is that business entities are responsible for their financial performance and the impacts they have on stakeholders with whom they interact.

A number of research studies considering what motivates environmental disclosure by Australian entities had common findings that include:

Research in corporate environmental disclosures show that entities typically disclose positive environmental information.This would be consistent with:

Social and environmental information are often ignored in financial reporting due to the difficulty of quantifying social and environmental costs.

Examples of externalities include:

Which of the following is not a perceived limitation of financial accounting?

The accounting profession has generally been proactive in generating social-reporting frameworks and regulating the associated reporting.

Applying the traditional financial accounting approach will mean that an entity that pollutes local waterways until they cannot support life will report: