Revista Sociedade, Contabilidade e Gestão (Apr 2016)
Shadows and Silence: Analysis of Social and Environmental Reports of the Energy Sector
Abstract
While it is acknowledged that there has been a rapid growth in the disclosure of social and environmental responsibility reports of companies, it is assumed also that there is a long way to go in that these reports meet their users, stakeholders, considering the characteristics of materiality, consistency, integrity and accountability in the construction of accounting information. So with the need to advance this discussion, some scholars in the field of environmental accounting began to suggest, among other ideas, building models formed by basic reporting accounts silence and shadow, they could identify differences between perceived environmental performance the public interested in the activities and affairs of the entity and performance that corporations claim they have achieved through their accounts and reports publicly available. While the report is constructed from silent speech, vision and corporate positioning, the second shadow report, part of the stakeholder perspective, i.e., the desires of stakeholders in the activities and business of the company. The objective of the study is to explore if the preparation of shadow and silent report can contribute to the improvement of the information quality of corporate environmental performance reports. To achieve this goal, it was prepared the silent and shadow reports of ELETROBRAS system and later confronted. It was found that companies have trouble to expose negative social and environmental impacts in reports; the volume of news published on corporate websites is not as significant as shown by other studies and the companies, over the years, didn’t publish the reports in a regular basis and with the same pattern; among other findings. Finally, it was concluded that the shadow and silent reports could be used to improve the information quality in corporate environmental performance reports.
