Enhancing environmental information transparency through corporate social responsibility reporting regulation

Abstract This research aims to contribute to the scientific debate about the lack of interlinkages between mandatory non‐financial reporting and sustainable business models. For our purposes, a counter‐accounting analysis was conducted on the non‐financial reports of a sample of 145 Italian firms interested by the Directive 2014/95/EU effects. Specifically, the study adopts an empirical approach to evaluate environmental information transparency, which represents one of the main critical issues concerning the non‐financial declarations prepared by European Italian Public Interest Entities (PIEs) to comply with Directive 2014/95/EU. The results highlight that corporate governance and report characteristics affect environmental transparency. Furthermore, the results confirm the overall attitude to avoid the disclosure of unfavourable or unavailable environmental information through impression management strategies. Finally, the analysis underlines the opportunities for policymakers to rethink mandatory non‐financial reporting to sustain the ecological transition of European PIEs.