The Princes Accounting for Sustainability Project has teamed up with the Global Reporting Initiative to form the International Integrated Reporting Committee, with the goal of creating a globally accepted framework for sustainability accounting.
The group aims to bring together financial, environmental, social, and governance information in a clear, concise, consistent, and comparable format. The committee will try to develop more comprehensive and comprehensible information about an organizations total performance, both on a prospective and retrospective basis. The role of the IIRC is to respond to the need for an integrated reporting framework, reflecting the organizations strategic objectives, governance, and business model, and integrating both financial and non-financial information. It will also deal with areas such as management commentary, social and compensation issues.
The committee is backed by a large number of groups, including the International Federation of Accountants, the International Accounting Standards Board and the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board, as well as the major international accounting firms.
The case for globally consistent financial reporting standards is well understood and accepted, said IASB Chairman Sir David Tweedie in a statement. It is appropriate to apply the same global approach to other aspects of corporate reporting. This initiative represents an important step on that journey.
Tweedie is one of the members of the Steering Committee, which also includes FASB Chairman Robert Herz, IFAC president Robert Bunting, Association of Chartered Certified Accountants chief executive Helen Brand, KPMG International chairman Tim Flynn, Grant Thornton International CEO Edward Nusbaum, BDO International CEO Jeremy Newman, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu CEO Jim Quigley, Ernst & Young chairman and CEO James Turley, and PricewaterhouseCoopers chairman Dennis Nally.
The IIRC brings together a cross section of representatives from civil society and the corporate, accounting, securities, regulatory, non-governmental organization, inter-governmental organization, and standard-setting sectors. It comprises a Steering Committee and a Working Group.
The Steering Committee is chaired by Sir Michael Peat, principal private secretary to the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, with Professor Mervyn King, chairman of the King Committee on Corporate Governance and chairman of the Global Reporting Initiative, as deputy chairman.
The Working Group has two co-chairmen: A4S Executive Board chairman Paul Druckman, and International Federation of Accountants CEO Ian Ball.
