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3.1 Integrated reporting benefices
Aurica Briscaru and Georgiana Corcaci
An integrated report should present information about the organization’s financial performance with
information about its ESG performance, in an integrated way. In order for integrated reporting to be a
viable and useful activity for companies, it must be underpinned by standardized financial and ESG
reporting frameworks. Integrated reporting provides a broad assessment of company value,
performance, and addresses a comprehensive range of financial, value, social, environmental and
strategic disclosures over long-term periods. This approach aligns the information, essential in
managing sustainable corporate value creation for all stakeholders. Standardized information can
empower stakeholders to more effectively access, manage, analyze and decide alternatives.
Global Reporting Initiative, International Integrated Reporting Committee, the World Intellectual
Capital Initiative and other international bodies suggest that information standardization provides new
information- processing capabilities that facilitate the yielding benefits of a more comprehensive
integrated reporting approach, like:
Greater access to and transparency of information from a wide range of both internal and external
information sources, to improve analysis on both short and long term;
More automated and streamlined assembly and review processes, eliminating pervasive review
systems;
More transparency, reuse and collaboration on reporting and analytical concepts used by internal
and external analysts, enhancing process agility;
More relevant information regarding decision analysis available for management and stakeholder
on both short and long term;
Wider collaboration and disclosure concepts providing a broader dialogue on reporting standards.
To reduce inherent opacity of the huge reporting forms of the organizations and to enhance efficiency
of the information versus credibility from stakeholders, now regulators around the world are migrating
their compliance processes from paper to the Internet. An eloquent example is Southwest Airlines. In
2009, following a continuous improvement process and dialogue with targeted stakeholders, the
company integrated various disclosure areas into its Southwest Airlines ‘One Report’: ‘Our team has
made a commitment to communicate our direction to the market and our One Report is a great
medium for that.’ Focusing on the primary audience for Southwest’s ‘One Report’, the company
initiates vary fuel and water re/use programs.
In the global circumstances, integrated reporting is not only a formal reporting option but also rather a
new analytical capability that provides more for all the interested groups’ expectancies. In addition, if
this way of doing business would be widely approached, the CSRM informative function will become
an authentic organizational communication function and it will be subsumed under to the
transformative function of the CSRM.
However, what is missing in the current CSRM informative function is a higher degree of predictability.
3.2 Organizational transparecy as social demand for predictibility
Human knowledge, as amplitude and authenticity, is limited by man’s biological and psychic
capacities, cultural patterns, social circumstances, etc. His biological confinements and psycho-social
determinisms offer him a mediated access to reality. Although aware of his uncertainties and lack of
accuracy regarding his knowledge, man remains dominated by the need to know. The finality of the
act of knowing is predictability over the world and over himself, the coverage of his need of certainty
and the safety and security offered by knowledge.
Science’s incomprehesible findings, the marketing society, the uncontrollable multinational business
and all the phenomena that he assists to as a spectator or as an actor of circumstance in a
increasingly virtual world, has intensified man’s need and the compensatory importance for
predictability. He needs, even for autosugestion, to belive that he doesn’t live in a snow globe that is
shaken only by those that have the macro-decission power and authority. In the slipstream of this
need one can find expectations regarding the transparency business making act.
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