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The Case of Sustainability Assurance: Constructing a New Assurance Service

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O'Dwyer, Brendan·2011·SSRN Electronic Journal
DOI 10.2139/ssrn.1742826
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Abstract

This paper presents an in-depth longitudinal case study examining the processes through which practitioners in two Big 4 professional services firms have attempted to construct sustainability assurance (independent assurance on sustainability reports). Power’s (2003, 1999, 1997, 1996) theorization of the way in which new subject areas are made auditable is used to frame the findings. The case reveals the fragile nature of efforts to innovate with assurance and render sustainability reporting auditable. Practitioners are shown to experience considerable discomfort and conflict in their attempts to construct a stable and legitimate knowledge base for assurance practice. Tacit knowledge embedded in highly subjective assessments of evidence is frequently enrolled to make assurance possible in the presence of vague guidance from assurance standards. In light of ongoing practitioner struggles, both firms have publicly acknowledged the limitations of traditional financial audit practice operating alone in the conduct of sustainability assurance. In order to offset these limitations, they propose a coupling of “expert” stakeholder assessments of reporting completeness with traditional audit assessments of data reliability. This assigns part of the responsibility for delivering on a key assurance objective (reporting completeness) to what some practitioners perceive as questionable stakeholder expertise. Overall, the findings suggest that innovation in new assurance practices may be stifled by an exclusive reliance on financial audit training and techniques and by certain constraints imposed by internal professional firm control procedures.

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Metadata

Authors
O'Dwyer, B.
Venue
SSRN Electronic Journal
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2011
ISSN
1556-5068 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.2139/ssrn.1742826
OpenAlex
W2124785073
Cited by
182
References
1
Type
posted content
Language
en
Open access
green

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O'Dwyer, B. (2011). The Case of Sustainability Assurance: Constructing a New Assurance Service. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1742826

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