AccountAbility, dedicated to promoting accountability for sustainable development, and the IRCA have produced the Certified Sustainability Assurance Practitioner Program, which will help auditors – both internal as well as external to companies – provide quality assurance to sustainability reports.
The field of sustainability reporting is expanding rapidly and assurances by auditing firms are an integral part of the process.
But an emerging concern associated with assurance has been the standards employed by the auditors. AccountAbility and IRCA have developed the CSAP in response.
“The challenge in delivering effective practitioner certification in this field is considerable and the development of this first iteration of the programme has been informed by an extensive multi-stakeholder consultation process,” said Maria Sillanpää, Managing Director of AccountAbility.
In 2003, AccountAbility introduced the AA1000 assurance standard providing guidelines to auditors for quality sustainability assurances. It combined traditional auditing methods and practical experiences of stakeholder engagement. The AA1000 has been successfully used in conjunction with the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines and the ISAE3000 non-financial assurance standards.
AccountAbility and IRCA hope to achieve the same kind of success with the CSAP program. They say it will be the subject of ongoing multi-stakeholder dialogue and will be reviewed a year from its implementation.