The whole picture

As metaphors go it’s faultless, and an instant aid to understanding the role of integrated reporting in the increasingly complex corporate disclosures landscape. It is the integrated report, proponents argue, that connects the financial with the sustainable, ensuring that a business venture is understood in the context of its impact on the environment and the natural world.

‘Even though there are a lot of sustainability reporting changes, the integrated report is ideally placed to bring everything together,’ says Roberts, a qualified accountant whose earlier career included spells as a journalist with BusinessDayTV, based in Johannesburg, and as a consultant for the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants and other bodies. ‘It’s the only report that covers the process of value and the company’s ability to create it,’ she says.

Though Roberts only became head of the IRC on its foundation in 2015, she has spent close to 15 years promoting a reporting framework that has had significant influence in her native South Africa and around the world.

Close association

The use of integrated reporting in South Africa has been bolstered by the country’s corporate governance code, penned by Professor Mervyn King, one of the most respected business academics in the world, who chaired the King Committee on Corporate Governance in South Africa and is viewed as one of the founding fathers of integrated reporting. Roberts worked closely with King from 2011, co-founding the Integrated Reporting Committee of South Africa, and then co-authoring a book, Integrate: Doing Business in the 21st Century, with him in 2013.

While South African companies have been involved in reporting that goes beyond the financial since King’s first report, King I, was published in 1994, integrated reporting as a global concept was not fully launched by the then International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) until 2013; three years later, with the publication of King IV, South Africa adopted the framework fully. The latest revision of the report, King V, due at the end of October, is expected to explicitly advise companies to report using the ‘double-materiality’ principle.

‘Double materiality is actually crucial,’ says Roberts. ‘In the connected world we live in, how can you not see that the impacts you’re having on society and the environment are important?’

Complex world

Today, integrated reporting exists in a much more complex world than it did in the first decade of the century. Sustainability reporting frameworks have proliferated, with the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards all jostling for position. At the same time, there has been some pushback from the US against the basic principle of sustainability.

Roberts believes, though, that sustainability reporting worldwide will outlast the opposition. Many companies, she says, will ignore the negative noise and push on with sustainability programmes and reporting because they recognise it as a core part of their business.

There are other pressures. Roberts expects stakeholders, including shareholders, to seek more information, and sees growing demand for sustainability information that is ‘complete and holistic’. In this context the integrated report has ‘huge benefits’, which she believes could be better publicised.

Responsibility for the integrated reporting framework was consolidated into the ISSB in 2022. Roberts believes it is now time to give IR a promotional boost, which ‘would help in those countries where there is confusion about how to fit everything together’.

Nonetheless, integrated reporting is alive and thriving in South Africa, where business leaders tell Roberts it helps with generating stakeholder trust, especially when companies hit trouble. Stakeholders want the information, and boards and managers will have to serve that demand.

‘Integrated reporting and integrated thinking, which underlies all of this, is going to be even more important in our world of connectivity, transparency, accountability,’ says Roberts. ‘We can’t ever go back to financial reporting only, we just can’t. That would be such a backward step.’

So, after all these years, is integrated reporting just a job for Roberts or has it become a vocation?

‘For some reason I’m very passionate about this, maybe because I want the world to be a better place,’ she says. ‘I think it makes a difference. It’s the right way of reporting.’