Assurance of corporate social responsibility reports: Does it reduce decoupling practices?

Abstract

[EN] Recent research shows the existence of a selective corporate social responsibil-ity (CSR) disclosure strategy that creates a gap between CSR disclosure and actualperformance. These CSR decoupling practices compromise the credibility of CSRreports and have triggered a demand for the adoption of credibility enhancementmechanisms, such as adherence to the global reporting initiative (GRI) reportingguidelines, and the external assurance of CSR reports. The effectiveness of suchmechanisms is not clear, however. This paper draws on legitimacy theory and ad-dresses the issue of symbolic versus substantive use of assurance, and compliancewith GRI reporting standards, by analysing their effect on CSR decoupling using aninternational sample of 1,939 companies (15,219 observations from 2002 to 2017).Analysis of a sub-sample of 708 firms (3,730 observations from 2011 to 2017) alsoshows that the application of GRI guidelines and the specific characteristics of theassurance provider—accountant, experience and specialisation—reduce CSR decou-pling practices. The results provide researchers, managers, assurance providers,investors, stakeholders and regulators with additional insight into the value of theexternal assurance of sustainability reports and have important managerial and pol-icy implications.