Proceedings

economic activities on the environment, but also the environmental investments. Such
a situation gives great credibility to budgeting for sustainable performance and is fully
supported by politicians and then is internalized to the sectoral ministries. There are
some similarities also in Australia, where, under the state budget honesty, Finance and
Treasury are required to disclose the estimated cost of electoral programs of the
government and the opposition before the elections (Van Helden, 2008). Experiences
from developing countries showed that the sectoral strategies for environmental
programs, if they do exist, are usually prepared without much consideration to the
actual costs and budgetary implications of planned policies. There is an abundance of
documents related to policies and strategies, but they often remain on paper. The
problem of these countries is the lack of reliable data that could support credible
monitoring systems. Thus, environment ministries need information and
methodologies for setting targets and measures for evaluating the results of
environmental programs both financially and socially. However, this is a good
practice, because these documents regarding the policies and strategies are available
to the general public, making the first step in improving transparency and reporting
Triple Bottom Line (TBL).
2. SUSTAINABLE PERFORMANCE - THE NEED FOR TBL REPORTING
On an international scale, there is growing number of entities reporting on
environmental and social impact of organizational activities. However, traditional
financial and reporting accounting do not provide adequately data for measuring
environmental and social impacts and, therefore, require a more detailed reporting
within organizations (Yongvanich & Guthrie, 2006). Recent years have experienced a
substantial increase in reporting on environmental and social problems by big
corporations (Gray, 2006).
According to a survey by Deloitte and Touche, 90% of the respondents believe that
the economic, social and environmental reporting is an important element in the
listing entity in terms of reputation and brand value. The survey also shows that 42%
of financial managers consider that companies with a good social and environmental
performance can successfully overcome weaknesses (Deloitte & Touche, 2002).
Depending on specific circumstances such as industry, location or business model,
environmental issues found in most corporate reports of entities relate to: climate
change, energy, water, biodiversity and land use, chemicals, heavy metals and toxic
air pollution, management loss, rarefaction of the ozone layer, the situation of the
oceans, fishing and deforestation (Esty & Winston, 2006). Cormier et al., (2005)
proposed an understanding of environmental reporting for the potential costs based on
the benefits to mankind. Hassel et al. (2005) examined the relevance of the
environmental performance and found that investors do not appreciate a performance
increase, as a consequence of environmental protection activities. The supporters of
the phrase:”one must pay to be green" say that there is a causal link between
environmental performance and financial performance (Hassel et al., 2005). The
attempts - to isolate the effects of pollution control in the process of determining the
net cash flow, and to assess the environmental impact that their environmental efforts
have on the entity, - proved to be challenges for the accounting research. Based on
studies conducted in order to examine the evolution of investment funds, sustainable
methods of investment, sustainable development indicators, the accounting regulators
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