Certified Sustainability Reporting Assurer (CSRA) is a professional training program intended for sustainability and assurance practitioners. The program aims to enhance participants’ technical understanding and practical capabilities in conducting sustainability report assurance based on the GRI Standards and ISSA 5000, covering verification of sustainability performance, controls, and reporting processes.
Why Assurance?
Certainly numerous stakeholders, including investors and potential investors, want assurance that management possess a long strategic horizon. To this end, a well-aligned Sustainability Report gives management and stakeholders additional confidence that management is equipped with tools to both accurately assess current conditions and successfully plot a course into the future. Both of these require good information.
Let us be frank and professionally concede that a bad report damages confidence in management. Reports with misaligned information also mislead management into:
- making bad assumptions
- overconfidence
- mis-estimating organizational competency
- failing to capture staff respect
- continuing to lose or mis-direct resources
Under confidence is also a failing in management and a well-constructed, solid Sustainability Report can guide management to understand strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities to move through short term survivability challenges and attain long term sustainability visions.
Deliverables:
- A team of professionals with certifications of Certified Sustainability Report Specialists, Certified Sustainability Report Assurers, with university backgrounds spanning appropriate fields;
- Assessments according to Accountability Assurance Framework ISA5000, GRI Standards, internal standards, best practice standards as advised or in general, other standards as stated within the Sustainability Report itself;
- Management Letter;
- “Statement of Assurance” for inclusion into the Sustainability Report;
- On-site Visits optional depending on assurance standard desired;
- Sustained and professional communication;
- Actionable recommendations;
- Interim Assurance or Gap Analysis.
As the training partner of ICSP, National Center for Corporate Reporting (NCCR) has been active since 2005 and began offering Assurance Services at the very earliest when Sustainability Reports started to require assurance. Leaving the market a few years later to allow graduates of NCCR programs room for experience, NCCR Assurance Services is optimistic that this current time for competition in this area will lead to growth, involvement and greater value of Sustainability and ESG Reports for management, all employees, and all other stakeholders.
