Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive 

The EU Commission's adopted CSRD directive will be a crucial factor in the Union's ability to achieve the goals of the Green Deal. The directive aims to harmonise sustainability information and meet the increasing global demand for sustainable business models. To ensure the credibility and maintain trust in sustainability reporting, an external review process, a verification of the content, is required. 

The implementation of the CSRD Directive into national legislation has a central role as it establishes a legal basis for future decision-making. Authorities, investors and customers will increasingly include sustainability aspects in their decisions, therefore it is crucial to provide accurate and high-quality reports.

For companies covered by the Directive, trust in the review process is of particular importance. These companies must be able to rely on independent bodies with specific knowledge, both in reporting and in the companies' specific industry, to validate the report as a whole and the consequences of the individual measures taken for sustainability purposes. 

In light of this, Swetic therefore wants to strongly criticize the investigation's proposal not to open up the possibility of allowing independent accredited quality reviewers to be an alternative to authorized auditors to review and prepare an audit report on the sustainability report, despite the fact that the directive allows for this. 

The proposal's limitations are not only negative for companies' opportunities for flexibility, they are also negative from a competitive perspective and constitute a possible risk of critical skills shortages as more and more companies are subject to the requirements for preparing sustainability reports and thus reviewing them.