#1 Wim Bartels: Insights into the Development of the European Reporting Standards

Listen to Wim Bartels, member of EFRAG’s Sustainability Reporting Board.

Teaser: There has been a critical debate around the first publication of the Draft EU Reporting Standards for companies. Frankly Speaking has asked Wim Bartels, a member of the Sustainability Reporting Board, for his views on the timeline, key concepts and the relationship of EU and emerging international standards - and about the role of accountants in all of this!

Topics:

EU Sustainability Reporting Standards. Wim Bartels as a member of the Sustainability reporting board spoke about its role, expectations and the work in general. What are the critical questions at stake, and what may still change in the final standards?
Double materiality as a crucial concept embedded in EU standards: Why reporting on risks and opportunities is not enough, and we need to understand what impacts companies have on people and the planet to move forward.
Positions and interests of accountancy firms. Is it ESG just a job creation exercise for accountants or will accountants save the world (help us to decarbonize the society)?
Reflections on the EU and International standards development. Are we going fast enough? Or is the progress too slow? Where it is going to be in another 5 to 10 years?

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“I’m fully behind double materiality. I believe that for companies going forward, we’re not only interested in their financial performance and their longer-term risks and opportunities, we also need to understand where they have an impact on society. If we don’t report on the impacts, investors will never integrate it into their evaluation because they won’t see it. So we need to start as early as possible with the impacts.”

Wim Bartels in Frankly Speaking