Founded July 2011 | Website sasb.org | |
Focus Sustainability accounting standards Location Pier 3, The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA, 94111 Slogan "Accounting for a Sustainable Future" | ||
The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) is a US non-profit organization incorporated in 2011 to develop and disseminate sustainability accounting standards. While the FASB has for the past forty years developed the accounting principles currently used in financial reporting in the United States, other social and environmental measures are now understood to be of relevance. The SASB aims to integrate its standards into the Form 10-K which must be filed by public companies with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; in this sense it differs from initiatives such as the GRI, by working within the current system of financial regulation. The general principle is, in Peter Drucker's phrase, "what gets measured gets managed".
Contents
Industry specific
The SASB aims to meet the need for industry-specific reporting standards, to ease comparison and benchmarking. In order to do so, a Sustainable Industry Classification System covering ten sectors and 80+ industries has been devised. From Q4 2012, industry-specific working groups are to convene to pursue the goal of completing the standards within two and a half years. Key performance indicators will then be updated annually. There is recognition that establishing what is material in information that is fundamentally non-financial is complex.
Financing
During development SASB is to be funded by grants and donations, with the aim to be self-financing thereafter through intellectual property licensing, education and training. Backers include Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Rockefeller Foundation.