South African companies showed a shockingly low level of public disclosure on social and environmental issues, professional services organisation KPMG said on Wednesday.
It said its International Survey of Corporate Sustainability Reporting revealed that South Africa’s levels of corporate reporting ranked last out of 19 countries surveyed.
Director of KPMG Sustainability Services, South Africa, Wayne Visser, said: ”Let us hope that South Africa’s major institutions – including government, civil society and business – treat the findings of this survey as a wake-up call.”
Only one percent of the Business Times Top 100 South African companies produced detailed separate public reports on social, environmental, health and safety or sustainability performance. This compared unfavourably with the global average.
Visser said that if large companies were to convince sceptical stakeholders, including environmental, human rights and community organisations, of the benefits of global capitalism, it would have to do a whole lot more to show that its commitment to social and environmental responsibility was more than just a public relations exercise.
Detailed, independently verified, public information on corporate sustainability performance, ie their social and environmental impacts, is again the very least that is expected in the new fishbowl world of stakeholder scrutiny.” – Sapa