Study On Driving Factors Of Voluntary Environmental Auditing

The society has paid more and more attention to environment problems, so environmental information disclosure and environmental auditing become inevitable requirements for future development of enterprises. In this context, whether a company has the internal driving force of environmental audit and adopt voluntary environmental audit will be an important factor of implementation of environmental auditing. In this paper, the drive factors of voluntary auditing is analyzed and an enterprise environmental audit voluntary index which evaluate the extent of the enterprise voluntary environmental audit is build, provides policy advice and support data to the implementation of enterprises environmental auditing.In this paper, the concepts, entity and content of voluntary auditing are proposed based on the literature review of environmental auditing and voluntary auditing. It is believed that the needs of enterprises can be divided into three levels: safe, social respect and self-realization needs, based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory. These three needs constitute the drive factors of corporate environmental voluntary auditing, and further decomposed into six major index and fourteen measurable sub-index, such as, potential litigation losses, stakeholder pressure, environmental imagery, corporate strategy and searching for international development and so on. Using chromatographic analysis to build a voluntary environmental audit drive index model, with expert scoring and MATLAB data process, it is discovered that because of their higher weights, the enterprise size, environmental protection yields and employee education have greater impact on companies to voluntarily carry out environmental auditing. Empirical analysis take 918 companies of Shanghai Stock Exchange listed companies as samples, which result in 0.5-0.8 distribution interval. After detail calculation and analysis on drive factors, I found environmental imagery, searching for international development, stakeholder pressure and legal policy factors scow lower, which restrict the implementation of voluntary environmental auditing. Under the indicators of these four drivers, waste recycling rate, multinational corporations, environmental savings rate, yield and environmental protection, the degree of employee education, environmental education and training input rate, the proportion of environmental taxes make greater impact on enterprises to develop voluntary environmental auditing. At the end of paper, it is suggested that for government, it should carry out voluntary environmental audit drive index evaluation system in enterprises, betterment the relevant tax policy, improve the government environmental allowance and administrative penalties; for social organizations and media, it should reinforce environmental information disclosure to raise awareness of environmental protection for the public; and for enterprises, it should make long-term development plans for sustainability, enhance employees environmental education, improve the education level to promote the implementation of voluntary environmental auditing.