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With sustainability reporting commonplace and mandatory in the E.U., a model to facilitate accumulation and assurance of sustainability information is needed. Currently, only limited assurance is possible, and comparability among reporting companies and over time is difficult if not impossible. Current standards of the U.S. Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), while a good start, are not sufficiently broad. The current financial reporting framework, while not appropriate for sustainability, provides a basis for a sustainability accounting and auditing model by considering objectives, postulates, consolidation, and sustainability indicators for sustainability accounting. 

The overall focus of sustainability accounting and assurance is risk assessment, which is based on sustainability from the perspective of all stakeholders—financial, social, environmental, and technological—and management of the risk.

Assumptions of sustainability accounting are developed from postulates of financial accounting and include:

• Continuity. Reports assume business continuity sufficient to meet sustainability objectives and requirements, including product disposal and environmental cleanup.
• Entity. Includes all activities that affect sustainability of an organization’s activities, goods, and services including suppliers, transport, disposal and cleanup.
• Period.  Reporting period covers product life cycle, from raw materials extraction through disposal and cleanup.
• Measurement unit. Varies for each sustainability indicator.

The reporting entity includes consolidated groups as well as disaggregation by product group, country, parts of the organization over which it has direct control and others over which it has indirect control such as suppliers, disposal organizations. The framework and model can be reviewed for independent assurance, and are comparable over time and among reporting entities.