SASB Aim for Structured Reporting Using XBRL

Posted on November 29, 2019 by Editor

As we heard at Data Amplified 2019, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) believe that structured data and standards are crucial to effective sustainability disclosure.

To make digital sustainability reporting as simple as possible for issuers, and to make data aggregation and analytics as convenient and effective as possible for investors, SASB are working to develop an XBRL taxonomy to model these types of disclosures, building on their existing work.

In 2018 SASB published the first set of industry-specific sustainable accounting standards covering financially material issues. Their standards mean companies can have precise, concise metrics to report on, and investors can have financially material, decision useful information to compare and analyse.

This year, SASB have been working with regulatory bodies and market participants find the best path forward for XBRL-based structured sustainability reporting using SASB metrics. So far, SASB have been reviewing the reporting landscape, assessing options for building an XBRL taxonomy that reflects SASB standards, and looking at the partnerships necessary to facilitate reporting and usage of XBRL sustainability data.

This is an excellent step forward for sustainability reporting. ESG reporting has suffered from a fragmentation of frameworks and a lack of standardisation. With effective standards prioritising industry specific, material information, and machine-readable reporting, sustainability reporting will rapidly develop a bank of comparable, digital data, that will help it reach its potential.