Reform of EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive should be aligned with future due diligence legislation, brief argues
"Moving forward with the EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive: Enforcement & review", June 2020
On the one hand, companies under the NFRD scope are not reporting properly, but only issuing high level statements without any adequate methodology or reference to any detailed HRDD processes in place. On the other hand, the national competent authorities are not adequately fulfilling their supervisory role, not drafting guidelines and toolkits for companies, not carrying our exhaustive controls and not exploiting all the compliance and enforcement mechanisms at their disposal...
[N]on-financial reporting obligations fall short of changing corporate behaviour and ... a mandatory HRDD legislation at EU level is needed... [T]he Commission’s DG for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union (DG FISMA) has announced that the reporting dimension of the incoming EU Due Diligence directive (lead by DG JUST) will be incorporated in the NFRD in the upcoming review...
[I]t will be essential to ensure that DG FISMA's proposal is ambitious enough not to undermine the future EU HRDD legislation, but to stimulate and strengthen it. In order to do so, the NFRD reform should rely on the UN Guiding Principles reporting framework as the means by which European companies fulfil their existing legal HRDD duty to report under the NFRD...