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The ethical, social and environmental reportingperformance
portrayal gap
Carol A. Adams

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School of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Deakin University, Burwood,
Australia
Keywords Management accountability, Financial reporting, Ethical investment,Social responsibility
Abstract The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it assesses in detail the extent to whichcorporate reporting on ethical, social and environmental issues reflects corporate performance incase study company Alpha. This “reporting-performance” portrayal gap is a key measure of theextent to which an organisation is accountable to its stakeholders. Alpha’s disclosures concerningits ethical, social and environmental performance for the years 1993 and 1999 were comparedwith information obtained on Alpha’s performance from other sources. Two different pictures ofperformance emerged leading to the conclusion that, in the case of Alpha, reports do not
demonstrate a high level of accountability to key stakeholder groups on ethical, social and
environmental issues. Of particular concern is the lack of “completeness” of reporting. Second, thearticle assesses the potential of recent standards or guidelines developed by the Global ReportingInitiative (GRI) and the Institute of Social and Ethical AccountAbility (AccountAbility) as well asthe industry’s own “responsible care” initiative to reduce this “reporting-performance” portrayalgap and improve corporate accountability. The conclusions point to theneed for other measures toimprove accountability including mandatory reporting guidelines, better developed audit
guidelines, a mandatory audit requirement for MNCs and a radical overhaul of corporategovernance systems.
Introduction
Ethical reporting by companies has become increasingly prevalent since the mid-1980sand there is a comprehensive body of academic literature charting the extent to whichmultinational companies (MNCs) in particular report on ethical, socialandenvironmental issues. The term “ethical reporting” encompasses reporting on all:
. . . those factors which are used by ethical investment funds to form an opinion on theappropriateness of an organisation’s business practices (see, for example, Harte et al., 1991;Rockness and Williams, 1998). This may not include much of the information on employees
that is generally considered to fall within the definition of “social reporting”, but may includeother issues which are not generally considered as “social reporting”. “EnvironmentalThe Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregisterauthor would like to thank the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants for funding
this research. The author is particularly grateful to Yvonne Laing who acted as a researchassistant on the project and who identified many of the sources of information. The author is also
grateful to Geoff Frost, Dave Owen and the participants at the 2001 APIRA conference at theUniversity of Adelaide for their comments on an earlier version of the paper, to the anonymousreviewers and to James Guthrie and Lee Parker. All views expressed are those of the author
unless otherwise stated.
Ethical, social and environmental
reporting
731
Received 13 November 2003
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