Integrated reporting assurance: First evidences after the transposition of Directive 95/2014/EU

In recent years, non-financial reporting has spread widely in Europe due to the growing attention paid by stakeholders and policymakers to this topic. Specifically, the European context has been characterised since 2017 by the rapid growth of mandatory non-financial reporting because of the transposition of the EU Directive 95/2014 by the EU Member States. The aim of the Directive was to improve the degree of harmonisation of the non-financial information published by firms. However, the achievement of this target is highly complex, as underlined in previous studies. The legal provision of a set of rules about accounting and auditing practices requires the definition of specific standards to achieve substantial equality of the information in terms of substance and form. This problem is typical in studies on non-financial assurance and, specifically, the Integrated Report. In fact, the assurance of the Integrated Report is not provided by a specific assurance standard. Furthermore, the possibility for firms to assure their reports with different levels of detail increases the risk of greenwashing. Based on this evidence, the aim of this paper is to identify and evaluate the assurance methods adopted by the European firms listed on the Forbes 2000 index during 2018. Moreover, we will evaluate the quality of third-party assurance statements using content analysis. Our results indicate that the assurance statements related to Integrated Reports are more informative than the others. However, our analysis reveals that the assurance of Integrated Reports practice is not standardised in terms of the quality of information provided by the assuror and the standard setter.