The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), a nonprofit organization that helps to provide and support accounting standards for U.S. corporations, has unveiled a new Data Provider Partner Program. This program will, hypothetically, allow investors to examine a company’s sustainability and performance over time.
While the SASB does not necessarily have any legal right to set standards or hold corporations accountable, they have created standards that have been used by investors and analysts in the past and are accredited by the American National Standards Institute to set standards.
The Data Provider Partner Program then, while not required for a company to use, would provide another outlet for companies that are looking to keep their investors informed.
Organizations can obtain free licenses to integrate the SASB framework into their own systems to provide data to SASB to be analyzed. That data can then be compared to SASB’s standards and to the company’s peers and competitors.
As the business community stands today, there are a wealth of different tools designed for combing through different environmental, social, and governance information that influence whether a company will succeed or fail. However, it can be hard to have any knowledge as to exactly how these different factors will impact financial success. SASB’s program seeks to unite all of this different data and present it in a way that will help a company to identify and correct any key sustainability issues it would not otherwise have noticed.
Most helpful of all, the Data Provider Partner Program can be easily incorporated into third-party platforms, allowing companies to change little of their own infrastructure while still gaining access to SASB’s analytical tools.
For anyone seeking their certification to become an accountant, understanding tools like these is not required, but may be helpful if they are adopted as a common standard by accountants and analysts.
