Accounting versus Sustainability Reports in Mining Waste Management: Transparency with Corruption in Latin America

Accounting and sustainability disclosures provide transparency to mining waste management and yet, negative social and environmental outcomes still occur. Corruption, understood as the devastation of the poor, can be limited through disclosures given to stakeholders as a form of transparency. Using mandated sustainability and accounting reports, a longitudinal descriptive case is built on two events from Brazil looking at transparency through the role of accounting and sustainability disclosures to enhance our understanding of fertile grounds for corrupt practices in Latin America. The appearance of transparency, facilitated by corrupt practices and actors, and its links with environmental and social disasters, is explored through performativity theory. We ask if accounting reports resulting from professional practices and artefacts have the potential to deter corruption in publicly traded companies more than mandated environmental and social reports. Saying something can produce a real outcome that changes reality; therefore, this study counts specific words and how they are used in sustainability and accounting reports before and after each event. We conclude that despite accounting reports give the appearance of more transparency than sustainability reports, neither the apparent transparency nor the silence was able to avoid social catastrophes in Brazil affecting poor rural areas. Accounting practices and artefacts provide more disclosures increasing the visibility of suspected corruption, with the difference explained by the extensive accounting regulation that restricts management exclusionary practices in their reports performativity. Mining waste management transparency is enacted when government officers, managers and auditors can engage in corrupt practices by avoiding visibilities of geological audits.