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d by assurance provider have to present information in a manner that effectively communicates its relevance to corporate value where investors are more likely to pay attention.

According to Dando and Swift (2003), the degree to which stakeholders are able to rely on and trust corporate social and environmental accounts is a marker of the efficacy, sincerity and legitimacy of accountability processes. Greater levels of transparency are not enough to demonstrate responsibility or enrich trust and confidence that an organization is sufficiently committed to a sustainability agenda. Responsiveness, learning, innovation and performance improvement are critical links between transparency and accountability. Reporting must be accompanied by robust and independent assurance of these aspects which requires an approach to assurance that goes beyond what is offered by the accuracy focused models of financial accounting and auditing. All these are expected from the assurance practice.

Arvidsson (2011) claimed that from the perspective of management, the IRMs (investor-relation managers) communicate non-financial information in the annual report based on three incentives. These three incentives for the investors to rely on non-financial information are their desire to enhance their understanding of the company, their belief that the non-financial information would convey a full and fair disclosure, and their interest towards the less tangible values described by the non-financial reports. This third incentive is related to the relevance of the non-financial information to the users, or in this, the investors.

There are a few scholars who also agreed with Dando and Swift. Alwer et al (2009) states that from the perspective of users of corporate information, such as stock-market actors or investors, their incentives for demanding and using non-financial disclosures are for more reliable assessments of corporate value (as cited in Arvidsson, 2011). An understanding of the role of intangibles in value creation and in corporate valuation (Holland, 2001) and an augmentation of financial forecasts (Eccles and Mavrinac, 1995) are the reasons for the investors to depend on the non-financial information. With these incentives proposed by the scholars, it appears that IRMs have acknowledged the needs of the stakeholder group through non-financial reporting.

Furthermore, IRMs stated that non-financial information is amounted to 35.7 per cent of the annual report. 65 percent of the IRM respondents said that the quantity of non-financial information had increased during the last three years (Arvidsson, 2011). Thus, all these findings imply that there is a need for non-financial information from the stakeholders. The assurance provider has to ensure that the quantity of non financial information reported is sufficient for the users.

There is a clearly a greater interest and demand from both the financial community and stakeholders for information on intangible assets. They believe that the best way to capture some of the value of intangible assets is by relying on more non-financial information. According to the survey conducted by Arvidsson (2011), 70 per cent of the IRMs believe that non-financial information focused on intangible assets is sufficiently reported in today's annual report. However, both practitioners and scholars stated that companies' disclosures of non-financial informati