Companies need “ESG controllership”

Here’s a great panel summary from the CPA Journal, featuring Kristen Sullivan, U.S. sustainability and ESG services leader, Deloitte; Todd Castagno, executive director of research at Morgan Stanley; Marc Siegel, partner in Ernst & Young’s (EY) financial advisory services practice; and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) member; and Amie Thuener, vice president, chief accounting officer, Alphabet.

Here’s an excerpt:

“In this regard, I think many companies are thinking about an ‘ESG control-lership,’” Thuener continued. “At the highest level, what that team is really doing is bringing that finance rigor to a rapidly evolving ESG landscape.” Thuener said she finds it interesting that “there’s this very long-established system around financial reporting. You’ve got SOX [Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002], you’ve got COSO [Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission], you’ve got the PCAOB. We figured out how to get financial reporting out the door within the system. That system doesn’t exist for ESG reporting, yet we are sort of behaving as if it does. … we’re going to have to figure out how to make that system work, and we’re going to have to do it quickly.”