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This paper aims to investigate the effect of audit quality and environmental auditing on integrated reporting and the effect of environmental auditing on audit quality.

Data was collected from a sample of 300 international companies during the period 2010–2019. The author collected the data from the Thomson Reuters Eikon database, sustainability reports and annual reports. A multiple regression analysis was performed to test the hypotheses.

The finding of this study confirms a positive and significant relationship between audit quality and integrated reporting. It is also found that environmental auditing has a positive and significant effect on integrated reporting. Thus, this study found a positive and significant relationship between environmental auditing and audit quality.

The findings in this paper identify strategies for improving integrated reporting as a crucial element in the processing of financial and nonfinancial information, to help managers and investors and shareholders take a long-term perspective. Therefore, the results encourage companies to invest in economic, environmental and social aspects. This enables accounting professionals, stock exchange authorities and users of environmental and social information to be aware of the factors associated with environmental reporting, to improve the efficiency of those producing the audit service.

The originality of this study lies in its consideration of a particular aspect of auditing, namely, environmental auditing. However, despite the large body of research on auditing and integrated reporting, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to examine the relationship between environmental auditing and integrated reporting. Furthermore, in this research, the author has emphasized the importance of the role played by environmental auditing on audit quality. This design has been neglected in previous studies. Finally, the choice of the field of investigation for the reliability of the data used and the generalization of the results obtained, enables us to make important contributions to the user of the information.

This paper aims to examine the effect of carbon emissions on audit fees. The authors hypothesize that firms in cities with higher carbon emission levels have lower reporting transparency, higher return volatility or are subject to higher reputation risk, causing them to be charged higher audit fees for auditing services.

The authors use panel data of 25,960 firm-year observations from a sample of Chinese firms. The carbon emission data for each Chinese city are obtained from the China Emission Accounts and Datasets for Emerging Economies. This paper adopts a multiple regression model to study the impact of carbon emissions on audit fees.

The authors find that firms located in cities with higher carbon emission levels and firms with more carbon emissions are charged, on average, a higher audit fee. This audit fee effect of carbon risk is transmitted by lessened information transparency and elevated financial risk within these firms. This paper shows that auditors consider carbon risk in their audit fee decisions and other factors that could influence audit risk and effort.

This study draws a connection between carbon emissions and audit fees. It is especially relevant due to the increasing importance of environmental factors in the audit risk assessment. In addition, the findings suggest that a firm implementing a proactive environmental strategy benefits the economy and decreases the costs to the firm for services such as auditing.

Existing studies have shown that all kinds of audit risks greatly affect audit pricing for accounting firms. However, it is still unclear whether environmental risks caused by environmental violations lead to a high audit fee. This study aims to investigate whether accounting firms raise audit fees after client firms have violated environmental regulations or have been punished for such violations.

This study selects listed firms with environmental violations between 1994 and 2018 as the treatment sample and match the treatment group with a control group of firms from the same industry, of similar asset size and with no environmental violations for the same time period. Then, this study constructs a difference-in-difference (DID) model to explore the impact of firm environmental violations (or punishment for environmental violations) on the audit pricing.

This study finds that accounting firms tend to raise audit fees after client firms have violated environmental regulations or have been punished for such violations, and this increasing effect is different due to environmental regulation intensity, regional span and internal control defects. Further evidences show that environmental violations influence audit fees through financial restatement, whereas environmental punishments impact audit fees through earnings management and risk-taking.

This study enriches the literature on determining factors of audit fees and economic consequences of environmental violations and provides empirical supports to understand the pricing behavior of accounting firms.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the contribution of the Mike Power’s Audit Society and associated papers from the 1990s to the (then) emerging field of environmental accounting. The paper also looks forward to how these seminal ideas are influenced by accounting in the Anthropocene, as examined in more recent sustainability accounting literature.

This is a reflective essay, drawing from the broad sweep of social, environmental and sustainability accounting literature.

The performativity of accounting and audit, as it pertains to the practices of environmental audit and sustainability reporting, is clearly evident, with Power’s work contributing significantly to this conceptualisation. At the same time, there is also a material dimension to this process. Indeed, distinguishing first and second-order risk (drawing from Power and others) is a critical and ongoing task for sustainability accounting.

We suggest that the Anthropocene offers challenges to the notion of the performativity of audit and reporting.

Increasing environmental pollution and destruction have damaged sustainability in polluting societies and organizations. For this reason, various environmental management programs have recently been developed by governments and the environmental protection agencies (EPAs) to control and reduce environmental pollution. One of these programs is environmental audit (EA), which has not been fully implemented yet in developing countries and it has many disadvantages. It seems that one of the reasons for the lack of perfect implementation of EA in these countries is the lack of adequate review of the factors affecting its implementation. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors affecting EA implementation and then analysis of causal relationships between them.

Decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique was used to identify causal relationships of factors affecting EA implementation. Based on the literature review and interviewing nine experts in EA, 17 factors were identified to influence EA implementation. Six experts were selected for the evaluation using snowball sampling method. Using the DEMATEL approach, a cause and effect relationship diagram was generated through which the effect of factors was analyzed.

Seventeen factors were categorized in terms of cause and effect, and the interrelationships of factors were also analyzed. “Reducing environmental impacts and improving environmental performance,” “obtaining environmental management system certificates” and “contributing to the environmental goals of investment projects” are the most prominent factors on the basis of their prominent score.

Analysis in the research is highly dependent on expert judgments and opinions may be biased. However, the initial matrix obtained from the experts is hindered by the ambiguity about some relationships. But this can be improved by using fuzzy and gray set theories. The factors used for the analysis may not be comprehensive and other researchers may find other factors.

Identifying the factors affecting EA implementation and analyzing causal relationships between them can be a guide and help governments to improve the implementation of EA or even develop this policy by being aware of the effect of the factors analyzed.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no comprehensive study of factors affecting EA implementation has been undertaken; this study is the first to identify these factors and analyze them using DEMATEL. Therefore, it is suggested that governments and EPAs in the policies focus on the significant factors.

This study aims to examine how audit committee (AC) attributes influence quality and quantity disclosure of energy consumed by the listed nonfinancial firms for the period of five years (2016–2020). The study aims at providing empirical evidence on how board of director’s independence influences the relationship between AC attributes and firms’ energy in achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) on world climate policy.

The study obtained data from a sample of 83 listed nonfinancial firms, content analysis technique was used to compute energy disclosure indexes using global reporting initiative standards, while regression analysis was conducted to test the relationship among research variables.

The study revealed that AC independence, diversity and meetings were significantly related with energy disclosure. Also, the study found that other variables were insignificantly related with energy disclosure.

The study is constrained for not considering all listed firms in the country. Furthermore, the study considered selected attributes, other important audit-committee size attributes such as audit-committee size, audit-committee size tenure could be study in by the future study.

The study’s findings would have practical implications for corporations and other business organizations seeking to actively involve the energy-related SDGs 7 and 13 in their business models and successfully communicate these efforts to stakeholders.

To the best of author’s knowledge, this is the first study that provides empirical evidence on the effect of AC attributes on the energy disclosure using effect of board independence as moderator in Nigeria.

The current study aims to analyze the role of International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) in sustainability issues and its impact on the attitude of practitioners (auditors) in industrial companies. The current study relies on the analytical method, one of the tools of the inductive approach, by examining the literature of researchers, international and local organizations, publications, series, alerts, and topics dealt with by the IFAC, as well as reviewing studies, theoretical and applied research, periodicals, books, and statistics. And specialized publications for this subject, which is related to other sciences – such as – environmental science, economic, and political sciences. The study reached many results, the most important of which are: (1) The first half of the current decade has seen high interest from the IFAC, has led to the issuance of International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) international standard on assurance engagements 3410, (GHG) Statements. (2) Sustainability has become important to a growing number of enterprises, and may have a significant influence, in certain cases, the financial statements, also became the sustainability of the topics under increasing attention from users of financial statements. Thus, the financial statements will need a practitioner to take into consideration sustainability issues and a private greenhouse gas when auditing the financial statements. This study is distinguished by analyzing the role of the IFAC and the IAASB for the period from 1998 to 2023 regarding sustainability issues.

Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) examine and supervise the activity of public institutions. The study aims at contributing to the existing literature on public sector audit by providing a classification of 29 European SAIs – 28 national SAIs and the European Court of Auditors (ECA) – based on a broad range of attributes varying from the SAIs' environment to its structure, activity, resources or transparency.

The authors apply quantitative methodology for clustering by means of multidimensional scaling and regressive ordinary least square (OLS) and logistic models.

The authors' results show that SAIs from veteran EU member states (MSs) are more similar amongst them and the same applies to SAIs from Nordic countries, Baltic countries, Western Mediterranean countries and Eastern countries. The authors also perform additional analysis focussing on currently relevant issues such as gender equality, age, environment or the sustainable development goals (SDGs), concluding that the younger the institutions' staff, the more transparent the institutions are. The authors also find that more transparent SAIs report on environmental audits, more prone to cover the SDGs in their audits.

The research is limited in purpose and scope because data cover only Europe. Given the limited number of observations (29), it does not have prospective purposes but only explanatory ones. The authors' findings are interesting for researchers because they offer original insights on public audit in Europe and cover matters of current interest such as environment, transparency or gender equality.

The research is also of interest for public auditors because it offers them information that may help them improve their activity and find institutional synergies, as the dataset is available to public auditors.

From a social view point, the paper shows that public auditors perform work on topics of interest for the citizens.

The dataset compiled for the research offers extensive data and a wide variety of attributes defining European SAIs and may offer future opportunities for research from different perspectives.

The purpose of this paper was to study the direct impact of audit quality on environmental, social and governance (ESG) transparency. It aimed also to investigate the moderating effect of media coverage on the relationship between audit quality and ESG transparency in the USA.

The sample consisted of US companies listed in the Standard and Poor’s 500 Stock Index between 2010 and 2019. The Thomson Reuters database was used to collect ESG disclosure scores and governance information. The authors applied multiple panel data regressions.

The results showed that audit quality has a direct positive effect on ESG transparency. The findings also showed that the high exposure to public media by firms, the more they commit to high audit quality leading to disclose more transparent ESG information.

The results illustrated the significance of an external audit on an organization’s ESG report. Second, improving data quality has significant consequences not only for rating agencies but also for investors, businesses and researchers. These steps are required to increase the information content of ESG ratings.

The findings demonstrated that third-party external verification improves the dependability of nonfinancial reporting, hence bridging the confidence gap between corporations and the market regarding sustainability reporting.

This paper aims at reflecting on the changing boundaries of public sector auditing. In particular the paper focusses on the opportunities and challenges for performance auditing, for sustainable development auditing and digitalised public sector auditing.

Building from the papers in this special issue, the authors draw on the literature on current development of public sector auditing (such as public sector auditing performance auditing, sustainable development auditing and digitalised public sector auditing) and propose a future research agenda.

The “changing boundaries” of public sector auditing may influence the difficulty for public sector organisations to manage the uncertainties and risks not only associated to corruption but also the public governance development (collaborative, digital and emergency governance). The authors speculate on the role that the “changing boundaries” of public sector auditing can play.

The paper contributes by setting new research avenues for future studies on public sector auditing in a post-new public management context.