Zeszyty Teoretyczne Rachunkowości (Apr 2014)
Rachunkowość jako źródło informacji na temat realizacji strategii społecznej odpowiedzialności biznesu
Abstract
Today, a company’s attitude towards society and its impact on the natural environment, besides economic goals, are becoming the essential components of the assessment of business activity. In business practice, both the form and scope of environmental and social disclosures presented by enterprises vary. The vol-untary status of social responsibility reporting, without disclosing information about a company’s nega-tive impact on the environment, allows presenting information which create a positive image. Therefore, disclosures made by entities are incomparable and also do not give a reliable view of the effect of their business operations on the natural environment and society. As a result, stakeholders cannot make right decisions in this area. Thus, accounting often plays an important role in providing such information. As an integral part of a company’s information system, accounting can be an essential source of useful and reliable information about environmental and social costs and benefits of business activity. However, it requires including environmental and social issues in the subject scope of accounting. It means that enter-prises need to introduce appropriate solutions into their accounting systems to identify, measure and present their impact on the environment. Taking the above into consideration, the aim of this paper is to present: (1) currently published standards of CSR reporting; (2) scope of social responsibility reporting by selected WSE listed companies – according to ISO 26000; the content analysis method was used for analyzing corporate websites; (3) possibilities for using accounting to measure and report CSR. Social responsibility accounting enables a company to provide and present information about its impact on the environment. As an integral part of a company’s accounting system, it allows identifying, measuring and presenting the environmental and social aspects of business activity in financial reporting. However, in business practice, the lack of unified standards causes difficulties connected with measurement and dis-closure of environmental and social categories. Therefore, it is necessary to develop uniform standards for measuring, evidencing and presenting information on social responsibility in financial reports.
