Special Issue May 2022
Since "financial accounting" is the corporate language because it communicates to customers as a whole different business practices, it can therefore reflect on the business' environmental activities and environmental activities are essential factors for the activity of business. Accounting primarily offers financial reports for the enterprise, but now non-financial information (such as social and environmental information) has to be added into the financial information. There are several requirements and regulations that include guidance for the preparation of the financial statements. However, there has been no progress with respect to non-financial records (i.e. environmental reporting). Some nations provide required publication of environmental reporting, although in others it is optional. Stocken (2000) claims that in the absence of compulsory legislation, businesses disregard voluntary disclosures because they are untrustful. Mandatory legislation certifies and provide legitimacy to studies. However, obligatory monitoring has certain drawbacks as well. While regulatory pressure makes sure and comparable, it limits the ingenuity of businesses. It guarantees amounts but not consistency, that is, it will raise the number of businesses make environmental disclosures, but it cannot ensure that companies are more accountable. Based on the discussion above, we may infer that neither compulsory divulgations nor voluntary divulgations are total. All have merits and demerits of their own. We should not deem them competitive; instead, they are complementary in design. There is also a need for governments to create some transparency standards in order to guarantee at least certain publication on major environmental concerns, while at the same time encouraging voluntary reports in order for them to be innovative, versatile and self-regulative
Voluntary Regulation, Environmental Disclosure, Reporting, regulatory framework, Environmental Disclosure in India
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