Accountants’ roles in sustainability accounting and reporting: The preliminary findings.

Abstract

Sustainability accounting and reporting (SAR) involves the corporate disclosure and documentation of environmental, social, and economic factors to assess the performance of firms. The evolution of SAR concepts is a result of the increasing importance placed on corporate accountability and transparency, which, in turn, influence corporate decisions regarding the environment and society (Kwakye et al., 2018). This paper aims to explore accountants’ managerial roles, which are informational, interpersonal, and decisional in ensuring the effectiveness of SAR. Even though accountants play a role in the firm’s value creation, achieving sustainability-related development goals remains a persistent challenge and continues to be difficult to achieve. Conflicting disclosure frameworks and changes in corporate reporting methodologies, as well as addressing stakeholder demands for non-financial information are challenges faced by accountants in terms of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting (Cohn, 2021). To achieve the aim of this paper, 69 accountants answered questionnaires and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyse the data. This paper finds that the decisional role has the highest mean score. This study recommends the extension of the current accountants’ roles with the necessary expertise in sustainability.