Non-financial Reporting: Substance over Form

The introduction of the non-financial statement among the corporate reporting documents has called numerous companies to deal with a new way of reporting own performance on mandatory or voluntarily basis, which goes beyond the traditional accounting data.

This regulatory evolution is the result of some best practices that the most virtuous companies already had previously adopted, and it represents an incentive for all other companies to review and reorient their accounting and reporting systems.

This paper examines the first non-financial statements issued by the Italian companies, obliged by the EU Directive and corresponding Italian law to disclose on non-financial matters. The paper aims to grasp some general trends on non-financial reporting, and to deepen some peculiarities deriving from the adoption of the non-financial reporting legislation.