Research On Assurance, Policy Requirement And The Quality Of Corporate Social Responsibility Report

The corporate social responsibility(CSR) report is an important way for corporate to disclose its fulfillment of social responsibility. Social responsibility reporting is becoming global business language and is being taken into decision-making consideration by investors. Only guarantee the quality of social responsibility report, can the reporters provide social responsibility information to stakeholders effectively. Studies have found that financial factors and corporate governance factors have a great impact on the quality of social responsibility report. Along with the emergence of social responsibility assurance and the implementation of regulatory policies, the factors of assurance and regulatory policy are also being paid attention. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and test the effectiveness of social responsibility assurance in improving the quality of reporting and whether regulatory policy is playing an active role in improving the quality of social responsibility report. We found that assurance can significantly improve the quality of CSR report, while policy’s effect on the quality of CSR report is not obvious.This paper has been divided into five parts. The first part is an introduction, discussing the research background, purpose and meaning, the domestic and international literature review, research content and methods, as well as innovation points. The second part is about the situation of social responsibility reporting assurance and policy requirements. In this part, on one hand, we analyze the characteristic of social responsibility report assurance, on the other hand, we summarize the desclosing policies formulated by relevant institutions. The third part is the theoretical analysis in which we analyze the role of assurance in improving the quality of reports from the principal-agent theory, signaling theory, audit information value theory and audit insurance value theory. Based on the theory of legitimacy and the theory of public pressure, we analyze the impact of policy requirements and public pressure on the quality of social responsibility report. The fourth part is the empirical research.There are two assumptions, the first is that assurance can effectively improve the quality of social responsibility reporting and the second is that mandatory policy requirements failed to improve the quality of social responsibility report. In this paper, we select the corporates of Shanghai Stock Exchange which disclosed social responsibility report from 2009 to 2011 as samples. By empirical test, we verified the aforementioned two assumptions. The fifth part is the conclusion and recommendations. We suggest to perfect policies about the social responsibility reports and promote accounting firm business development in social responsibility reports assurance.There are two innovation points in this paper. The first is that we demonstrate and test the impact of the emerging fators of assurance and policy on social responsibility report quality, which riches the theoretical research on social responsibility report quality. The second is that we provide evidence for promoting social responsibility report assurance and perfecting existing policies.