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as the customer service and climate change. Seeing that non-financial issues revolve into increasingly significant for strategic decision making and organizational assessment, it is expected that the need for assurance on full corporate disclosures relating to sustainability, as well as assurance relating to performance on particular issues to be increasing.

Although the global trend is increasing, the use of external assurance for sustainability or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports varies significantly across regions. This is largely due to the different stages of maturity in sustainability reporting and assurance. The practice was developed in Europe and this region has the most mature sustainability reporting, and as a consequence, a strong presence in the assurance market. There are indications that there will be strong growth in Asia in coming years as it has become the second largest region for assurance, and further growth is predicted. In contrast, in North America where reporting is well established, reporters are far less likely to include external assurance (ACCA, AccountAbility & KPMG, 2009).

Auditors' primary focus has always been on the audit of historical financial information, in which auditor's report often provides assurance on financial information (Royal NIVRA, Amsterdam, 2010). However, organizations performance is not entirely dependent on past performance. Future perspective based on current performances are equally important as governors, politicians, controllers and government audit offices have become more interested in performance data in budgets and reports.

Figure : Trends in non-financial reporting
Source: Palenberg, Reinicke W., and Witte, J. M. (2006). Trends in non-financial reporting. United Nations Environment Programme, Division of Technology, Industry and Economics (DTIE).

The study above shows that there have been increasing developments on non-financial reporting practices and based on a linear model, it is estimated that approximately 4,100 companies will be producing non-financial reports in 2020.

There has been much discussion and debate concerning the role of assurance services in the future of the auditing profession. Mainly, the assurance of entity performance measures is seen to be the potential areas of growth in assurance services since most of the entities performance measures would be of a non-financial nature.

Percy (1999) proposed there is now a push towards better management and analysis of operational reviews and reports, once the financial statements have satisfied all of the information needs of stockholders and stakeholders. He added by saying there will be demand in these reports for the use of non-financial performance measures to assess the quality of a company and its ability to develop into the future (Coram, Monroe & Woodliff, 2005).

Both ACCA and ICAEW have realized about the importance of non-financial information and the growing demands for it since non-financial issues can be material. Consequently, the need to assure that they are presented properly is also growing particularly in the areas of corporate responsibility and public interest concerns, legal and regulatory changes.

In the year 2010, Royal NIVRA in Amsterdam stressed that users in the public sector in particular are more concerned in non-financial information, since