ISSA 5000 General Requirements for Sustainability Assurance

With an ever-stronger trend of sustainability conscious consumers, entities are looking to their sustainability practices to attract and maintain business, and to be open and honest with stakeholders.

Ensuring this qualitative reporting is reliable, from data collection through to how it is presented is therefore a vital part of an assurance engagement. Due to this, the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) previously announced plans for a new standard to cover sustainability assurance engagements.

The proposed new standard, ISSA 5000 General Requirements for Sustainability Assurance Engagements, will be an independent overarching standard for both reasonable and limited assurance across any related sustainability topics. The standard will enable engagements of sustainability information across multiple reporting frameworks.

It aims to be responsive to the growing stakeholder interest in suitable sustainability assurance reporting, and to complement and build on existing guidance such as ISAE 3000 Assurance Engagements Other than Audits or Reviews of Historical Financial Information and ISAE 3410 Assurance Engagements on Greenhouse Gas Statements.

ISSA 5000 will provide more specific requirements on the following areas that have been deemed important to sustainability reporting and assurance engagements:

• Suitability of reporting criteria;
• The scope of the assurance engagement;
• The reliability of evidence provided and what is considered sufficient and appropriate;
• Internal control systems and how these may impact on the ability to receive sufficient and appropriate evidence; and
• Materiality in relation to qualitative information rather than quantitative.

Last week, the IAASB announced plans to accelerate public consultation on the proposed new standard, following its April meeting.

The consultation is now expected to open by August 2023 with comments accepted through to December 2023, moving up on the original timeline by several months. Final approval of the proposed standard is expected in September 2024.