Environmental accounting reporting practices in Bangladesh: findings from existing research

Abstract

Environmental Accounting Reporting practices have existed for the past three decades and have been gaining prominence recently. There is wide consensus that the quality and depth of reporting leaves a lot to be desired. The research report aims to explore the current state of the research on the environmental accounting practices in Bangladesh. An in-depth analysis of 26 research papers ranging over the last 23 years has been performed to evaluate the extent and quality of reporting of environmental issues of organizations. Efforts were made to identify the extent of voluntary reporting, and the quality of the reporting on their own done by the participating firms. Efforts were also made to identify the industries that had better quality reporting compared to the industries lagging, and then further analyzed to identify whether the leaders in reporting disseminated adequate information related to environmental issues to the related stakeholders. The findings indicate that the scope and extent of reporting by most of the companies from a variety of industries is inadequate and lacks depth of information. Furthermore, most of the information provided by companies is qualitative in nature and misses out on important data, numbers, and statistics. The authors have stressed the need to develop comprehensive and in-depth environmental accounting reporting guidelines while maintaining that reporting should be an involuntary and statutory requirement. The regulators should require companies to refrain from solely using qualitative data and focus the reporting on measurable and comparable environmental accounting data.