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| Tuesday, 23 March 2004 |
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ICASL initiatives to raise quality of corporate reporting Two major initiatives to raise the quality of corporate reporting in Sri Lanka to meet evolving global public and stakeholder expectations were unveiled yesterday by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka (ICASL), the country's national accountancy body. The Institute said it would recognise Social Responsibility Reporting at its 2004 awards for best annual reports, to be presented in Colombo on March 26, and will establish a Financial Reporting Faculty to widen access to information and expertise on accounting standards and financial reporting. In the first of these two initiatives the annual reports for 2002-03 now under scrutiny are being evaluated for Social Responsibility Reporting or Triple Bottom Line (Profitability; Corporate Social Responsibility; Environment) reporting and separate awards are to be presented to the winner and runners-up, the Institute said. ICASL President Indrajith Fernando said this represents a first in financial reporting in Sri Lanka and would raise the stature of the Institute's annual awards, encouraging more corporates in Sri Lanka to strive for international best practices in Social Responsibility Reporting. "There appears to be a growing feeling in the community that organisations should be accountable not only for their financial performance, but also for their environmental and community for social and ethical performance," he said. "The rationale is that to be sustainable, organisations must not only be financially viable but also environmentally and socially viable." He said Triple Bottom Line reporting and accountability may become much more important in the context of the growth of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) funds that do not invest in companies they consider to be environmentally or socially unsustainable or irresponsible; the prospect of environmental taxes to encourage organisations to internalise environmental costs, and the development of activity-based techniques to measure the resources used and wasted in making products and delivering services, which help identify achievable cost savings. Fernando said that ethics are a reputational risk that NGOs and others sometimes highlight when an organisation's actions appear unethical or environmentally irresponsible. This, he said, was another argument in favour of Socially Responsible Reporting. The second major new initiative of the ICASL is the establishment of an independent Financial Reporting Faculty under the patronage and guidance of the Institute. The faculty's first Chairman Reyaz Mihular said one of the key objectives of the faculty would be to provide training to enhance quality of financial reporting in Sri Lanka's corporate sector. |
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