Sustainability Reporting And The Role Of Accountants: A Structured Literature Review

Accountants are responsible for corporate reporting, including the demands of the stakeholders for non-financial information. In this respect, it is considered that the accountants play an important role in relation to their involvement in the sustainability reporting activities. Therefore, the main objective of the present paper is represented by the review of the existing literature on sustainability reporting and the role of accountants in this matter. To provide a clear picture of the academic papers in this field, the structured literature review (SLR) was used as a research method. The findings show that researchers investigated sustainability reporting from three main perspectives: practices related to sustainability reporting; technologies and reporting tools; factors which influence the disclosure / reporting. Our findings reveal that studies related to the role of the accounting profession are limited and most of them envisage accounting systems. Despite this limitation, our research could be of interest to academics as it provides ideas for future research. The summary of the existing literature in this field could also be useful for accounting professionals who are responsible for not only accounting but also reporting on sustainability information. Moreover, the results of this study may be relevant to companies required to disclose such information.