Business Reporting principles

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Reporting principles for defining report content:  Stakeholder inclusiveness: The reporting organisation must identify its stakeholders, and explain how it has responded to their reasonable expectations and interests.

 Sustainability context: The report must present the reporting organisation’s performance in the wider context of sustainability.  Materiality: The report must cover topics that:  reflect the reporting organisation’s significant economic, environmental, and social impacts; or

 substantively influence the assessments and decisions of stakeholders.

 Completeness: The report must include coverage of material topics and their boundaries, sufficient to reflect significant economic, environmental, and social impacts, and to enable stakeholders to assess the reporting organisation’s performance in the reporting period. (The topic boundary is the description of where the impacts occur for a material topic and the organisation’s involvement with those impacts).

Reporting principles for defining report quality:  Accuracy: The reported information must be sufficiently accurate and detailed for stakeholders to assess the reporting organisation’s performance.  Balance: The reported information must reflect positive and negative aspects of the reporting organisation’s performance to enable a reasoned assessment of overall performance.

 Clarity: The reporting organisation must make information available in a manner that is understandable and accessible to stakeholders using that information.  Comparability:  The reporting organisation must select, compile, and report information consistently.

 The reported information must be presented in a manner that enables stakeholders to analyse changes in the organisation’s performance over time, and that could support analysis relative to other organisations.

 

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Nigeria’s 2017 VNR outlined the institutional dimensions for creating an enabling policy environment for the implementation of the SDGs through its Economic and Recovery Growth Plan (ERGP) (2017-2020). The ERGP’s focus on economic, social and environmental dimensions of development makes it consistent with the aspirations of the SDGs.

Principles and core elements Section 3 of the Guidelines advocates for businesses to go beyond compliance and seek sustainability as part of their business operations. There are principles and core elements under the Economic, Environmental, Social and Governance factors that serve as indicators of what constitutes responsible business conduct.

Governance Businesses should conduct and govern themselves with Ethics, Transparency and Accountability