London - The Prince's Accounting for Sustainability Project has teamed with the Global Reporting Initiative to form the International Integrated Reporting Committee, with the goal of creating a globally accepted framework for sustainability accounting to bring together financial, environmental, social and governance information in a clear, concise, consistent and comparable format. The committee will try to develop more comprehensive and comprehensible information about an organization's total performance, on a prospective and a retrospective basis.
The committee is backed by a large number of groups, including the International Federation of Accountants, the International Accounting Standards Board and the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board, as well as the major international accounting firms.
"The case for globally consistent financial reporting standards is well understood and accepted," said IASB Chairman Sir David Tweedie. "It is appropriate to apply the same global approach to other aspects of corporate reporting. This initiative represents an important step on that journey." Tweedie is a member of the Steering Committee, which also includes FASB Chairman Robert Herz, IFAC president Robert Bunting, Association of Chartered Certified Accountants chief executive Helen Brand, KPMG International chairman Tim Flynn, Grant Thornton International CEO Ed Nusbaum, BDO International CEO Jeremy Newman, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu CEO Jim Quigley, Ernst & Young chair and CEO James Turley, and PricewaterhouseCoopers chair Dennis Nally.
The IIRC comprises a Steering Committee and a Working Group. The Steering Committee is chaired by Sir Michael Peat, principal private secretary to the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, with Professor Mervyn King, chairman of the King Committee on Corporate Governance and chair of the Global Reporting Initiative, as deputy chair. The Working Group has two co-chairs: A4S Executive Board chair Paul Druckman, and IFAC CEO Ian Ball.
