Marisa Agostini

Mandatory Disclosure about Environmental and Employee Matters in the Reports of Italian-Listed Corporate Groups

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the impact of Italian Legislative Decree 32/2007 – following the 2003/51 European Directive – and the disclosure of environmental and employee matters in terms of overall volume, completeness of information, presence of bad/good news and target-oriented information. Content analysis has been applied to all Italian corporate groups that made public both the consolidated annual report and the stand-alone social and environmental report in 2005 and in 2010, for a total of 96 reports. The results show that despite the overall increase in sentences devoted to environmental and employee matters, the completeness of the information has not substantially improved, indicating that the 2007 regulation has been ineffective. The Italian experience could provide useful insights for European regulators. Such insights may inform policy recommendations to design a mandated social and environmental accountability process with the potential of providing information to societal stakeholders while facilitating accountability.

Accounting fraud, business failure and creative auditing: A microanalysis of the strange case of the Sunbeam Corporation:

This article closely examines the Sunbeam Corporation’s path to failure and explores the reasons for its singularity. From the analysis of US fraud cases included in the UCLA-LoPucki Bankruptcy Research Database, this corporate case appears as an outlier. For Sunbeam, the time-lapse between fraud disclosure and its final bankruptcy is the longest of the entire sample; it is unique because of its length. This article uses a historical microanalysis to evaluate different hypotheses about the Sunbeam Corporation’s path to failure. The relationships between acquisitions and fraud, ‘scapegoat dynamics’ and ‘creative auditing’ are identified as the most relevant issues to be examined against a changing institutional context. The resulting reconstruction of the events provides unexpected insights and recommendations for future research on auditing and accounting fraud.

Financial and Sustainability Reporting: An Empirical Investigation of Their Relationship in the Italian Context

“Integrated reporting ” has gained prominence during the last few years. Investors have required more information also about how sustainability issues and initiatives are expected to contribute to the long-term growth strategy of a business. This communication, which should be provided by top management, leads toward the convergence of sustainability and financial reporting into a single “narrative.” Both financial reporting and non-financial reporting together provide all stakeholders with a comprehensive view of the position and performance of a company. This process has also been encouraged by some European regulations. However, despite these, social and environmental information is still disclosed differently in consolidated annual reports and social–environmental reports. The present work focuses on such differences of content. The analysis regards both (mandatory) consolidated annual reports and (voluntary) stand-alone social–environmental reports prepared by Italian-listed corporate groups for two different accounting periods (both before and after the implementation of Directive 2003/51/EC). The final results show relevant and persistent differences in the disclosure of environmental and employee matters between financial and sustainability reporting.