Case Study and Improvement Measures of Sustainability Assurance: Focusing on Assurance Standards and Assurance Reports
Asian Tax Journal Vol. 26 No. 1 (2025), pp. 59-82
Abstract
Just as a unified standard for sustainability disclosure was established to provide ‘consistent and comparable’ sustainability information, IAASB has finally announced ISSA 5000 in November 2024 to provide ‘reliable’ sustainability information. In this paper, we compare and analyze accounting information and sustainability information from the perspectives of disclosure and assurance and standards and systems, and suggest that unified assurance standards are necessary to provide consistent, comparable, and reliable sustainability information, just as consistent and comparable disclosure standards are necessary. In addition, we compared the cases of sustainability assurance report formats of five Korean companies and confirmed that the names of assurance reports, addressee, assurance standards, assurance levels, assurance scopes, and assurance report formats were all diverse, making comparison difficult. This paper suggests that in order to provide reliable sustainability information to investors and improve the comparability of sustainability assurance, it is necessary to unify the assurance standards, assurance level, assurance scope, and assurance report format. Specifically, in order to secure the comparability of assurance, the assurance standards should be unified so that only one assurance standards are recognized or only assurance standard that can maintain the same assurance quality should be recognized. In addition, it is suggested that the assurance level and assurance scope should be aligned and the format of the assurance report should be unified similar to the audit report on financial statements. This paper compares cases of sustainability assurance report formats of Korean companies to provide consistent, comparable, and reliable sustainability information, and suggests the necessity of unifying the assurance standards, assurance level, assurance scope, and assurance report format.
Keywords
- sustainability assurance
- reasonable assurance
- limited assurance
- ISSA 5000
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