Is sustainability reporting disclosing what is relevant? Assessing materiality accuracy in the Spanish telecommunication industry

Abstract

Companies have highly adopted sustainability reporting practices. Nonetheless, there are still some important research gaps related to the contents that sustainability reports should include and the appropriate frameworks to define them. This research contributes to the study of sustainability reporting practices of companies from a sectorial perspective, and it is focused on applying the materiality principle. It combines a qualitative and a quantitative approach to assess the materiality and the quality of GRI reports among sustainability dimensions and companies within an industry. To this end, an innovative research method based on scores is proposed and applied to a sample of companies in the telecommunications industry. The results indicate that while the GRI sustainability issues declared as material are more likely to be reported, there are still incoherencies in using materiality analysis as a threshold for reporting. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the materiality or quality of the reports differs among companies or sustainability dimensions. The findings suggest that materiality analysis, as companies present it, may lead to incoherencies in treating GRI aspects and indicators.