The going-concern-principle in non-financial disclosure. Concepts and future challenges

This book has been motivated by the need to fill the existing gap in the literature on the going concern principle in non-financial disclosure by companies in the international scenario proposing concepts and challenges to come. Following the main accounting literature, requirements and regulations, this book proposes thecurrent state of the art in non-financial disclosure, collecting the main mandatory and voluntary frameworks and standards (e.g. European Directive 2014/95/UE on non-financial information, Global Reporting Initiative, International Integrated Reporting Council, Sustainable Developments Goals and UN Global Compact, Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, Climate Disclosure Standard Board, Carbon Disclosure Project, AccounAbility 1000 Assurance Standard v3, Corporate Water Disclosure, International Organization for Standardization 26000, Gruppo di Studio per il bilancio sociale and so on). This is a useful proposition for the investigation of the presence versus absence of going concern in the sustainability and non-financial reports and disclosure by companies all over the world. Several issues and characteristics of information provided to stakeholders are drafted. Through a qualitative methodology (e.g. document analysis, content analysis, bibliometric analysis and interviews), this book is intended to show the incidence of going concern in non-financial disclosure and what content and meaning it is referred to. Even if some theories can be applied in this investigation (e.g. stakeholder theory, disclosure theory), several samples of analysis have been collected and investigated using different key indicators by the content analysis approach (e.g. presence versus absence, frequency, sustainability score value). The collection of the corporate sustainability reports published in the last few years by companies follows the criteria of multiple samples in the light of the main frameworks and standards. However, the methodological analysis is included in the last part of this book, also presenting data and indicators (e.g. words weights, keywords clusters, co-occurrences) from the Nvivo and VOSviewer software to obtain a wide generalization of results. In the light of the going concern analysis and primary evidence in this book, the path towards the going concern assumption in non-financial disclosure is still open and infantile. The evolution of sustainability frameworks, standards and jurisdictions in non-financial disclosure could be directed towards the adoption of the going concern principle ensuring transparency and accountability to all stakeholders, among which a relevant role is played by investors. Additionally, the need to harmonize sustainability and non-financial disclosure could assume business continuity as one of the fundamental requirements in developing non-financial reports. This is the way towards the adoption of renewed and transparent business models directed to achieve high financial and non-financial performance creating value in the long term.