A contabilidade ambiental em empresas certificadas pelas normas ISO 14001 na região metropolitana de Belo Horizonte-MG

Abstract

Companies which adopted the Environmental Management System need to comply with ISO 14001 and to control resource allocation in order to make decisions. The accounting exerts an important role on supplying information to managers on helping managing the environment. This study aims to analyze the importance of the Environmental Accounting concepts and tools for companies certified by ISO 14001. Data were collected through semi-structured questionnaires with accountants and environmental managers from a sample of 10 companies from the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte. It has been demonstrated that these companies do not employ Environmental Accounting tools for making the decisions related to their environments; instead they use traditional Accounting. As for the occurrence of changes in the Accounting process after awarded with the environmental certification, the investigation demonstrated that the traditional accounting reports did not changed. Some companies just included specific items in their plans in order to encompass the environmental events. The investigation also detected a lack of knowledge - in the discourse of some respondents - about the benefits of employing the Environmental Accounting in the managerial process of the companies.