The increasing diffusion of sustainability reporting at global level, together with standardisation at national and regional level, now highlights the importance of a solid sustainability assurance framework , in which conformity assessment operators can also be included as specialised service providers.
The international framework being developed by the IAF Working Group on Sustainability - a group of experts from IAF, ISO and other Quality Infrastructure organizations - aims to establish requirements for both accreditation bodies and bodies that will allow them to operate with the same rigour as statutory auditors , regardless of the country or the legislation applied.
In this sector, in fact, legal auditors and auditing firms have already capitalized on the experience gained in financial insurance, developing and modifying a series of international standards , specific for the sustainability reporting verification processes.
In several countries, this expertise has facilitated a constructive dialogue between auditors and institutional stakeholders, to the point of integrating the standards into some legislations or promoting similar projects in many others.
The proposed scheme would integrate existing elements of the ISO framework, such as ISO/IEC 17029 and ISO/IEC TS 17035 for accreditation, and the ISO 14064 and ISO 14019 series for information verification and validation , and incorporate new concepts introduced by ISSA 5000 and its supporting standards.
The development of the criteria and principles of the scheme will be followed by the assessment of the opportunities for publishing it as a (proprietary) scheme or as a normative document and the training phase will be addressed, which may be managed directly by the owner of the scheme or by another international organisation, or delegated at national level.
THE STUDY
The study aims to highlight synergies with standards applied by statutory auditors, identify areas for improvement and reaffirm the effectiveness and reliability of compliance assessment.
In particular, an in-depth analysis was conducted of the new International Standard on Sustainability Assurance (ISSA 5000) developed by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB), which will be the main global benchmark for sustainability assurance used by statutory auditors and will serve as a basis for regulators.
Additionally, other supporting standards were reviewed, including the Proposed International Ethics Standards for Sustainability Assurance (IESSA ), part of the IESBA Code, and the International Standards on Quality Management (ISQM 1 and ISQM 2) .
The aim is therefore to demonstrate the ability of the conformity assessment system to meet the requirements outlined in ISSA 5000 and its supporting standards. (Source: https://www.accredia.it/ )