The Assurance of Sustainability Reporting: An Extra Fee or a Guarantee

Abstract

Despite the significant importance of sustainability reporting as an objective measurement of sustainable performance, nowadays there is a consensus on the poor quality of sustainability reporting among academics and practitioners. This research aims at evaluating the impact of the assurance of the sustainability report on its quality level and that could be the reason behind a poor-quality level. Based on the relevant literature, the research applied Ordinal, Logistic Regression analysis to test the impact of the external assurance of the report on the quality of sustainability reporting. This relationship has been tested on a sample of 500 sustainability reports that represent the Global Fortune 100 (G100) companies for a period of 2011–2015. The empirical study concluded that there is an extremely significant, positive relationship between the assurances of the sustainability report on the quality of sustainability reporting.