Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility in accounting

The term sustainable development is understood as such socio-economic development in which the process of integrating political, economic and social activities takes place, while maintain-ing natural balance and the durability of basic natural processes, in order to ensure the possibility of satisfying the basic needs of individual communities or citizens of both the modern generation, and future generations. Sustainable development has three dimensions: ecological, economic and social. A consequence of the growing importance of social and ecological aspects of business operations is the increased interest and requirements for reporting, understood as a set of reports containing both financial and non-financial information. This chapter covers the concept of sustainable development, CSR and explains the role, goals and challenges of social responsibility accounting.CSR reporting has become some kind of a trend in non-financial reporting. Many large interna-tional companies make great efforts to prepare CSR reports in order to transparently communicate with their stakeholders as well as strive to achieve established social and environmental goals. CSR covers different aspects of business, with, among other things, environmental issues being highlighted. The importance of green accounting has been recognized globally where the adoption of the 2014/95/EU Directive has just further raised awareness of the importance of reporting on the environment and environmental activities. This chapter covers the basic concept and development phases of sustainable and environmental accounting, explains the role of green accounting in modern business conditions and discusses the benefits and opportunities it provides to interested users.

Integrated reporting

Companies struggle to communicate value through traditional reporting. Integrated reporting can prove to be an effective tool for businesses looking to shift their reporting focus from annual financial performance to long-term shareholder value creation. Such a shift should cover the demand from investors for a structured reporting framework that goes beyond the traditional financial reporting. The International Integrated Reporting Framework will encourage the preparation of a report that shows business performance against strategy, explains the various capital used and affected, and gives a longer term view of the organization. The framework will be attractive to companies who wish to develop their narrative reporting around the business model to explain how the business has been developed. Integrated reporting attained various degrees of popularity depending on the geographical regions. While it is mandatory for all companies listed in South Africa’s stock exchange, in other regions it is used by businesses on voluntary basis. Re-search shows that in the USA the adoption of integrated reporting is slower than in most of the other developed regions.

Narrative reporting

For years financial and management accounting reports were based primarily on “hard” numbers. Extensive written descriptions and explanations were not common in practice. However, in recent decades there has been a significant shift towards “softer” and more narrative communication in accounting. The purpose of the chapter is to identify and describe the determinants of the develop-ment of accounting narratives in practice, and to explain why narratives are gaining importance in accounting communication. The chapter presents the links between accounting and language, the development of accounting narratives and the factors determining the use of narratives.Narratives give economic units the opportunity to explain the situation and the achieved finan-cial results. The use of narratives helps to better meet the information needs of stakeholders. There are still many challenges ahead of narrative financial reporting, such as determining the minimum content of reports, ensuring comparability of reports or the issue of external control of narrative financial reporting.An insufficient application of professional accounting materiality judgment is considered as one of the main causes of disclosing too much irrelevant information and not enough relevant informa-tion. Preparers of narrative reports should be aware that without applying materiality principle the information disclosed in the reports are not considered transparent and stakeholders lose confidence in such companies.

Cryptoassets—nature, valuation and disclosures in accounting

Within cryptoassets we can find cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum) and digital tokens which are specific right or value representatives. One of areas that there are a lot of doubts regarding these new technological solutions is accounting. It is not clear how we can classify particular groups of cryptoassets and how to value them in financial statement. The aim of the chapter is to present the essence, use and valuation issues of cryptoassets and also to review the definitions of selected asset groups in the currently applicable accounting regulations to identify those asset groups to which cryptocurrencies can be classified. The chapter also discusses available accounting models under IFRS, with a major focus being put on the recognition and presentation in balance sheet. The assessment of models is based on distinguishing different types of tokens (payment, security, utility) as well as on differentiating between holders’ and issuers’ perspective.

Socially responsible investments

Socially responsible investing (SRI) is a decision making process concerning the allocation of free financial resources, where the investor aims at maximization of profit and minimization of risk on one part, and includes the socio-ethical and environmental-ecological considerations on the other. We can find four types of motives, describing them as mobilizing forces to undertake SRI. These are psychological and social, legal, economic and strategic, financial. Investors invest their funds in such investments by choosing the right investment strategy for them. We can find many different classifications relating to strategies and actions within the framework of SRI. The most important classifications of the SRI strategy were prepared by Global Sustainable Investment Review and Eurosif. These two organizations prepare also reports on SRI in the world and in Europe. The European market has the largest share in the global SRI market but the most dynamically developing market is Japan.

External costs—accounting perspective

Nowadays, shareholders would like to receive more information about companies’ activities. They would like to know how the company treats their local community, how their activities influ-ence the environment or even if the company’s activities are harmful for society. This information is needed and has to do with costs for society. Tracking these costs, called external costs, more precisely seems to be becoming more important in accounting and is starting to become a new research area. The need for treating external costs like a part of research in accounting is indicated by a trend of the accounting of social responsibility, the theory of legitimacy in accounting, the concept of full cost accounting and the directive on disclosure of non-financial information. The use of the envi-ronment isn’t free of charge for companies. According to national laws, companies are obligated to pay environmental fees or taxes when using the environment. Existing fees and taxes for using the environment don’t resolve the problems of measuring and evaluating the external costs in companies. What is important to note is that external costs are connected with using goods such as air, soil, water, silence or the aesthetics of the surroundings. They all are non-marketable goods; they don’t have prices on the market. Therefore, one of the non-market valuation methods could be used to evaluate them. One of the biggest problems for accounting in the future will be measuring the volume of using these goods or measuring the size of reduction in the quality of public goods suffered and assigning the decrease to particular companies.

Derivatives in accounting

One type of financial instruments are derivatives whose price depends on the value of the underlying instrument. There are two different approaches to accounting of derivatives: general model—in which derivatives are presented as assets or financial liabilities, measured at fair value and referred to the financial result, and hedge accounting—which requires symmetrical recognition of changes in the value of the hedged item and the hedging instrument. Information on derivatives is presented in the financial statements. The derivative is reflected in the balance sheet of the entity that is a party to a given contract, while the result obtained on the derivative contract is presented in the profit and loss statement.

Social responsibility reporting standards

It is well known that today, in addition to already established financial reporting, multi-national companies are paying more and more attention to non-financial reporting on social, eco-nomic, environmental and governmental issues. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting is still predominantly voluntary, and it is not standardized. However, there are various international organizations which have been developing frameworks and voluntary standards for non-financial reporting. Those organizations have been putting a sizable amount of effort, time, and knowledge in order to offer some specific solutions to interested organizations preparing CSR reports. Pro-posed standards, guidelines, and frameworks serve as tools for simplifying CSR reporting. In that sense, the most important providers of sustainability reporting guidance, such as GRI, OECD, United Nations Global Compact, International Organization for Standardization, certainly stand out. A significant contribution to promoting the importance of sustainability reporting was also made by the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (2014/95/EU) which obliged large public interest companies with over 500 employees to disclose certain non-financial information. According to the analysis of the content and scope of the most important frameworks and standards of sustain-ability reporting, it can be confirmed that they have certainly contributed to improving the quality of non-financial reporting.

Costs of research and development

Year by year, research and development works constitute an increasingly important ele-ment of the functioning of enterprises. Appropriate recording of expenditure and settlement of their effects requires (above all) determination of the actual stage of works. Consequently, there is a dis-tinction between research and development works. Another aspect that determines the principles of recognizing expenditure in the accounting books is to determine whether the developed product/technology belongs to the area economically developed by the unit or to the unrecognized area. The adequate determination will help to place expenses either in the sphere of activity and basic unit or in the sphere of other operating activity. Financial reporting for intangible assets is perhaps one of the most difficult and most controversial topics of financial reporting. In this article it is compared three concepts of financial reporting for R&D costs: IFRS approach, Czech approach for non-profit organizations and Czech approach for profit organizations.

Non-financial reporting in selected European countries

Directive 2014/95/EU gave the EU Member States a certain flexibility when transposing it into national law. Each Member State could, therefore, decide to introduce regulations of varying degrees of stringency. According to Directive 2014/95/EU, large companies have to publish reports on the policies they implement in relation to environmental protection, social responsibility and treatment of employees, respect for human rights, anti-corruption and bribery, diversity on company boards (in terms of age, gender, educational and professional background).In order to satisfy the EU rules, the Republic of Croatia has implemented into its legislation the provisions of the Directive 2014/95/EU regarding the disclosure of certain non-financial reporting, by amending the Accounting Act. Some companies registered in Croatia have been disclosing some of the required non-financial information in their reports even before the effective date of the Direc-tive, but conducted studies conclude that there is still a room for improvements.This chapter provides a short overview of regulation of non-financial reporting in the Czech Republic as well as overview of previous research on non-financial reporting in this country. The results of the research present that few Czech companies publish standalone corporate responsi-bility report. More popular is the disclosure of non-financial information within annual financial reports but even this approach is pursued by less than half of respondents. The amount of disclosed information in annual reports is mostly up to 5 pages. 11 companies (10.38%) provide more than 5 pages of environmental information and only 7 companies (6.60%) provide more than 5 pages of social information.In Poland, the requirement to present non-financial information relating to CSR was introduced by the Accounting Act. Public trust entities are required to present in the report on the activities a separate part called “Statement on non-financial information”. In 2017, the Polish Standard of Non-Financial Information (SIN, 2017) was published to help enterprises fulfil their obligations under the EU Directive.