Conformity of integrated reports in relation to the guidelines for international integrated reporting council

Abstract

The growing concern with the socio-environmental issue mobilizes several governmental and non-governmental initiatives with the objective of discussing and proposing solutions. The Integrated Reporting, introduced by the International Integrated Reporting Coucil, is one document that aims to gather relevant information about a company's strategy, governance, performance and perspectives, in order to reflect the commercial, social, and environmental contexts in which it operates, assisting managers in decision-making. In this perspective, the objective of the study is to analyze the determining factors on the conformity of the integrated reports with the guidelines issued by the International Integral Reporting Council in Brazilian public companies. For this purpose, we conducted a descriptive and documentary research regarding the procedures of data collection. The sample investigated included 254 companies listed in the B3 2015 “report or explain” list. Also, the checklist included 33 items distributed in seven dimensions. The results showed that the main factors that influence the level of conformity of information disclosed by the companies investigated are the return on assets, the size of the company, the sales growth, the market-to-book relation and presence in the business sustainability index. There is evidence of a strong interest from the companies in disseminating sustainability information, essentially those that are more prominent and exposed in society.