The Board of Management and Supervisory Board are informed on sustainability matters on a quarterly basis. In addition, there are specific topics that are reported on annually, such as the Global People Survey (GPS) results. Our sustainability reporting is exposed to the risk of material misstatement due to human error, incomplete data, or fraud. In response to these risks, we have implemented several internal control processes over our sustainability reporting data to ensure that all relevant information is captured and accurately represented in our sustainability statement.
We have implemented several key measures and components to manage the risk of a material misstatement in our sustainability reporting. These include:
Internal control mechanisms: Sustainability information is collected from several departments in our organization, mainly Finance, Corporate Sustainability, Human Resources (HR), and Procurement. Internal controls are developed and established to ensure the reliability of sustainability data; these are automated in some cases but often still manual. In this reporting year, we improved our existing internal control procedures, both in general and specifically regarding sustainability reporting. No priorities were identified in this first year, with improvements made to all data points where we report metrics. We recognize that we need to make further improvements, particularly in relation to more automated data collection solutions (see also “systems” below). We will start to further improve our control framework on non-financial information based on the prioritization of focus areas across sustainability matters.
Alignment with financial reporting: To ensure consistent and coherent financial and sustainability data, our sustainability reporting process is, where possible or applicable, integrated with our financial reporting framework. This allows for a unified approach to reporting and risk management.
Risk identification and assessment: We identify and assess risks that could impact the quality of our sustainability reporting. This process includes evaluating potential risks related to data integrity and compliance with ESG reporting standards.
Systems: We are exploring solutions to further enhance our reporting on sustainability-related information. Our current processes are a mix of data management platforms and manual processes. We will continue to focus on enhancing these processes to improve the efficiency of our data management and have already begun projects designed to improve our data collection and quality. The field of sustainability reporting poses a challenge to traditional data collection systems and solutions, and we want to ensure that any new solutions we implement will support the management of our sustainability performance in the years to come. We are therefore treating this as a priority, while also recognizing that it will take time to embed innovative automated solutions across our firm.
Finance is responsible for our external sustainability reporting and supported by our internal control department, HR and CR. In our first year of sustainability reporting on the basis of the ESRS, we have made use of our own KPMG N.V. experts in Sustainability Advisory. Their knowledge now needs to be embedded into our Finance team. As a first step to realizing this and improving the quality of our data, we have expanded our corporate reporting team to cover sustainability reporting. Next, we aim to integrate non-financial reporting into our internal control department and to investigate whether relevant data can be generated more automatically to increase efficiency and reduce the risk of errors, contributing to a more robust internal control environment and enhancing our ability to consistently and efficiently report on our sustainability performance.