A Personal Message To The Cantankerous Critics Of The International Sustainability Standards Board

I should have seen the hate mail coming. In October 2018 my Oxford colleague Professor Richard Barker and I published a Green Paper  titled “Should FASB and IASB be responsible for setting standards for nonfinancial information?”  Much to our surprise and delight, just two years later in September 2020 the Trustees of the IFRS Foundation published their “Consultation Paper on Sustainability Reporting.” The idea was to establish an International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), parallel and coordinated with the International Accounting Standards Board which sets standards for financial reporting for most of the world. The U.S. has its own version called U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles but they really aren’t all that different.

Even before the consultation period for the ISSB had closed I got the first inkling of the problems to come. Professors Carol Adams and Charles Cho wrote a biting article targeted at Barker and me titled “Sustainable development is too important for self-interest and political posturing.” Ah, the niceties of academic discourse! Their basic argument was that we didn’t need an ISSB since the Global Reporting Initiative had already done this work. Stripping away their angry rhetoric, the core issue is “single vs. double materiality,” a phrase arcane to anyone that is not involved in the sustainability reporting standards wars.