Proceedings of The 4th International Conference on Applied Research in Management, Economics and Accounting
Year: 2021
DOI:
Aligning Integrated Reporting Standards in the Digital Economy Context
Georgiana Trăistaru (Burlacu), Anca-Gabriela Petrescu, Florentina-Raluca Bîlcan and Mihai Petrescu
ABSTRACT:
A series of factors have contributed to the development of non-traditional methodologies that allow counterbalancing the strengths of finance and accounting with the integration of non-traditional information in annual financial statements, methodologies that have taken the form of integrated performance reporting. Among those aspects, we mention sustainability and corporate governance, the growing pressure of information users to have access to information other than financial results resulting from the activity of companies, the need to look at the company as a living organism in the ecosystem of today’s economy. Seeking to open up the processes of harmonizing reporting standards and the role of stakeholders, this study aims to highlight the crucial importance of an unanimously accepted standard that until last year was not considered a priority. However, the impact of Covid-19 has irreversibly reset the way of thinking and acting on what we consider to be a priority for companies and implicitly for the global economy. In addition, the analysis conducted in this study reinforces the idea that non-financial reporting is the best catalyst for sustainability and transparency of information on it, especially with an accelerated trend of recovery of the digital economy and implicitly by the need to increase the degree of transparency of financial and non-financial information for stakeholders. The results showed that the process of reducing the gap regarding the integrated reporting of companies is fundamental and implicitly we consider that the standards regarding the reporting of non-financial information in an integrated way should be global, unanimously accepted and assumed.
Keywords: integrated reporting; standardization; corporate governance; sustainability; stakeholders.