An international taxonomy for integrating SASB standards into corporate reporting was released Tuesday by The Value Reporting Foundation.
More than 1,280 businesses now disclose ESG data using SASB standards, including more than half of those in the S&P Global 1200 index, the foundation said in the news release.
The Value Reporting Foundation was created in June when the International Integrated Reporting Council and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board merged.
The foundation worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers on initial development of the SASB Standards XBRL Taxonomy that was designed to facilitate reporting in accordance with the 77 SASB industry standards. The key objectives are to simplify the disclosure process for businesses and improve the quality, usefulness and comparability of environmental, social and governance disclosures to investors.
The SASB Standards XBRL Taxonomy, a preparer's guide and other materials are available on the Value Reporting Foundation website.
A draft of the taxonomy was released for public comment earlier this year, and that feedback was incorporated into the final version. The Value Reporting Foundation also created an XBRL Taxonomy Review Committee to help oversee ongoing maintenance of the taxonomy, and plans to work with software providers and issuers to provide examples of SASB standards disclosures tagged with XBRL tags.
Director of Technology Madhu Mathew said in the release that the taxonomy is compatible with base taxonomies for financial reporting standards, so businesses can leverage pre-existing processes and structures when tagging SASB disclosures, while many corporate reporting software providers and auditors already have data reporting technology in XBRL format that can be applied to ESG data. The new taxonomy "is a major step forward in making ESG disclosures simpler for businesses and data aggregation and analytics more efficient for investors," Mr. Mathew said in the release.
