engleski

Meeting a challenge of non-financial reporting on social issues in Croatia

The provisions of Directive 2014/95/EU on disclosing non-financial and diversity information have been enacted in Croatian legislation through the Croatian Accounting Act effective as of January 01, 2017. With this enactment, companies registering 500 and more employees are now required to disclose non-financial information, or explain why they have chosen not to disclose this information. Being a country with report-or- explain system of disclosing non-financial information, the purpose of the research is to assess the quality of social information disclosed in non-financial reports of Croatian companies registering 400 and more employees. The motive for this approach is grounded in the fact that social information is a significant part of non-financial information that these companies will be obliged to prepare and publicly disclose. The research was conducted on the sample of all Croatian companies registering 400 and more employees disclosing non- financial information. The assessment of the quality of environmental information was grounded in the frameworks defined by globally accepted standard for non-financial reporting e.g. UN Global Impact, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), etc. This was a qualitative research, employing content analysis method. The research results show that Croatian companies do disclose certain social information, but not in a way to be accepted as a reliable basis for managing this significant segment, as a framework for benchmarking and competitiveness assessment. For this purpose a minimum of social information needed for benchmarking will be indicated, i.e. as the ground for assessing the company’s competitiveness in relation to similar ones in its surroundings. These results point to the need of developing systems for measuring social impact of activities using standardized means for disclosing this type of non-financial information.

non-financial reporting ; social information ; directive 2014/95/eu ; croatian accounting act

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