Download Free The Struggle Over The Eu Non Financial Disclosure Directive Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Struggle Over The Eu Non Financial Disclosure Directive and write the review.

A new EU Directive represents an important step towards greater corporate accountability: it will require large companies to report on their social, environmental and human rights impacts and the risks their activities pose for third parties. While the circumstances leading to the Directive were favorable, the final text was weakened significantly as a result of opposition from business, German business in particular. This contribution examines the political struggles over the EU's Non-Financial Reporting Directive and seeks to explain the positions of different countries and interest groups in the negotiations. It identifies domestic regulations as a sufficient but not a necessary condition for support of the Directive. It also suggests that Germany's particularly fierce resistance is attributable at least in part to the size and influence of Germany's Mittelstand or medium-size enterprise sector.For an updated and more theoretically and empirically sophisticated version of this paper, please see "The Challenges of Upward Regulatory Harmonization: The Case of Sustainability Reporting in the European Union" "https://ssrn.com/abstract=3340646" https://ssrn.com/abstract=3340646 as well as "The tenuous link between CSR performance and support for regulation: Business associations and Nordic regulatory preferences regarding the corporate transparency law 2014/95/EU" "https://ssrn.com/abstract=3451630" https://ssrn.com/abstract=3451630.
This article discusses the most recent step taken by the European Union to enforce a corporate responsibility to respect human rights: the Directive on non-financial disclosure. Large public-interest entities are obliged to report on how the company discharges itself of its responsibility to respect. The mandatory reporting requirement represents a move in the right direction, but should be viewed without disregard of its shortcomings. Firmly embedding the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in this regime is desirable but nonetheless omitted. Also, ambiguous open norms and unnecessarily rigid harmonization could undermine the extent to which the Directive will prove to be effective.
The aim of the EU Directive 2014/95/EU, requiring the mandatory disclosure of non-financial information (NFI) by large undertakings and groups, is to rebuild trust with stakeholders. This book aims to summarize the relevant literature about company information with particular reference to the voluntary vis a vis mandatory NFI.
The paper analyses the implementation of the EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive in four European Member States: UK, Germany, France and Italy. The first part reviews the main trends, key differences and potential difficulties or unexpected consequences of the Directive. The paper then explores in more detail key substantive elements of the Directive, and how these have been dealt with by each of the surveyed states. This section includes an overview of the scope and format, environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors to report on, the information to be provided, the notion of materiality, the verification process, the basis of reporting and the consequences of non-compliance. The paper also presents a comparative table and comprehensive analysis of the domestic transpositions of each of the four countries under review. The Directive provides the first comprehensive framework for ESG reporting at the EU level but gives considerable leeway to Member states in the transposition process. Whilst generally the new EU-wide legislation has been a positive step, there are a number of gaps in the Directive itself, which have not been adequately addressed in the implementing legislation.
This is the final report of the "Study on the Non-Financial Reporting Directive" for the Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union (DG FISMA). This report provides data analysis as part of the ongoing monitoring of implementation of the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD). For this exercise, the study analysed data on more than 17 million companies, gathered survey responses from more than 200 companies and conducted interviews with over 60 stakeholders. Among the main findings is that there are about 2 000 companies (excluding exempted subsidiaries) in the EU27 within the scope of the NFRD. In practice, there are approximately 10 000 additional companies (excluding exempted subsidiaries) that are obliged to prepare nonfinancial statements based on broader transposition of the Accounting Directive and NFRD into national legislation. There are a further estimated 9 000 other public interest entities (PIEs) and large non-PIEs reporting without a legal requirement. The recurring administrative costs for providing non-financial statements under the NFRD are on average EUR 82 000 per year, of which about 40% can be fully attributed to the legal requirements. These costs depend, among others, on company size and sector as well as assurance level, comprehensiveness and type of reporting. In addition, about two-thirds of the surveyed companies incur assurance costs, which amount to EUR 76 000 per year on average.
This monograph is an attempt to contribute to the new but currently dynamically developing direction of basic research in the discipline of “economics and finance” concerning non-financial reporting. The novelty of this publication lies in the following: (1) it disentangles the quantity of non-financial disclosure into five thematic aspects (environment, employees, human rights, anti-corruption and community involvement) and six content items (business model, non-financial KPIs, policies — including due diligence processes implemented and outcomes of these policies, principal risks and managing these risks) and develops individual nonfinancial indices in the cross-section of these dimensions, taking into account the requirements of the Directive 2014/95/EU; (2) it focuses on the rarely examined specific subsets of non-financial reporting, for example, anti-corruption, human rights, community involvement and risk-related disclosure; (3) it disaggregates the quality of non-financial disclosure into materiality and reliability and develops self-constructed indices applying the non-financial reporting regime introduced by the Directive and EU Guidelines; (4) it is the first study to test the effectiveness of the Directive, comprehensively taking into account the quantity and quality of disclosures over such a long period of time — three years before and three years after the implementation of the Directive; (5) it explores the relevant determinants of non-financial disclosure, including company characteristics (size, profitability, leverage, industry), corporate governance measures (state ownership, foreign ownership, CSR committee), primary stakeholders (investors, creditors, consumers and employees), secondary stakeholders (environment, regulators, standard setters, e.g., GRI and NFIS), experience in sustainability, stand-alone sustainability reports, external assurance, international presence, public expectations, participation in the UN Global Compact as well as inclusion in the Respect Index.
This book explains how the traditional paradigm of private and public organizations is changing as a result of the multiple factors that are affecting the way in which goods and services are produced, and for whom they are produced. In view of these disruptive trends, the theory of the firm needs to be updated and to some extent rethought. Moreover, diverse challenges and opportunities such as climate change, aging populations, and new public accountability requirements are necessitating novel frameworks to ensure the long-term survival of public and private organizations. Against this backdrop, the authors contribute to the debate over the firm’s primary interest by proposing a new way of viewing the nature of the firm and its relationship with stakeholders. In addition, they carefully analyze the challenges and opportunities mentioned above, evaluating their significance for various important aspects of organizations through different lenses. Global in scope, the book also takes the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals into account. Accordingly, it will be of interest to all readers seeking a better understanding of the evolving nature of firms and organizations in our changing world.
This article addresses an important but not directly visible development arising from a new EU Directive introducing mandatory human rights reporting for certain large companies domiciled in the EU. The new Directive requires parent companies to report on human rights issues on a consolidated basis, which will oblige the parent to disclose inter alia the impacts of its subsidiaries, the group policy pursued on these issues and group-level due diligence measures undertaken to prevent, mitigate and remedy adverse impact. This article explores these new requirements' potential to improve access to remedy for victims of human rights violations linked to a company's overseas subsidiaries who sue the parent company in its EU home state for the parent's part in the human rights violation. The focus is on cases brought by victims against parent companies under English law and on analysing the potential effects of these reforms on the obstacles to access to remedy in such cases created by the doctrine of corporate veil and the standard of duty of care. This article argues that by requiring parent companies to report on these matters, the Directive could be mandating companies to acquire knowledge of and involvement in the business of their subsidiaries and show this in their annual reports, which may result in them assuming a duty of care to employees (and others) affected by the actions of their subsidiaries.