Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) won the fifth annual award for publishing the best report on environmental and social responsibility in 2011. The Corporate Reporting Awards (CCRA) competition is hosted by CorporateRegister.com, the free directory Web site that provides access to a library of nearly 40,000 reports, plus news and analysis related to them.

CCE split away from its North American operations in 2010, retaining rights only to European territories. The Coke bottler serves customers in Belgium, Great Britain, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.

CorporateRegister.com oversees voting in nine categories. The category for best overall report received 45 entrants. CCE was also recognized for having the best carbon emission disclosure.

The winners and runners-up in all the categories are listed in the CCRA 2012 executive summary. The full report (requires free login) includes a comprehensive review of the state of play and trends in corporate reporting worldwide.

CorporateRegister.com’s awards gained preeminence due to their independence from advertising, grants, and other conflicts of interest. All CorporateRegister.com signed-up users can vote.

CorporateRegister.com invalidates votes by employees for their own organizations. In addition, bad ballots, such as those cast by voters using fictitious details, are also removed. The numbers of rejected submissions dropped to less than 6% of all votes cast, down from 21% in 2011. The decline is believed to be due almost entirely to CorporateRegister.com’s diligence in excluding entries from organizations with a record of invalid votes in prior years.

Integrated reporting
Novo Nordisk won CorporateRegister.com’s 2012 award for most successfully combining financial and non-financial information into one report. The runner-up is Hyundai Engineering; second is Vancouver City Savings Credit Union. The integrated reporting category had 18 entrants this year.

CorporateRegister.com identified 350 integrated reports published during 2011, around 6% of all the corporate responsibility reports published during the year. Banks predominate. Half of the integrated reports are from countries in Europe, but Australia has most integrated reporters in any one country.

Paul Scott, director of CorporateRegister.com, identifies at least three different emerging concepts of integrated reporting. A combined report would merge financial and non-financial performance — the information would have some degree of parity. A connected report presents the information in multiple, linked documents and data sources. An “annual report plus” tacks on sustainability data to a conventional annual report.

“We have yet to see a connected report,” Scott says.

“Many of the integrated reports coming out of South Africa [are] essentially annual reports with short additional sustainability sections. This third approach of ‘annual reporting plus’ could mark a step backwards for corporate responsibility reporting if it replaces stand-alone CR reports. But, of course, if it results in net additional CR information, then it should still be welcome.”

Corporate, investment, accounting, and standards-setting professionals have joined together in the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC). The organization is developing and testing a framework for integrated reports (see Integrated Reporting Gets Down to Business, 2 August 2010).

Scott offers his opinion of the IIRC in the CRRA 2012 trends review: “… a look at the 40-person [IIRC] council composition leaves me with the overwhelming impression that this is an organization dominated by accountants, auditors, and finance.  There’s some civil society representation (WWF, Transparency International, Ceres) and several large corporates, but given the council’s composition my apprehension is that CR reporting may soon be subsumed into conventional annual reporting.”

That trend could mean integrated reports will focus, perhaps exclusively, on the investment community, Scott says. “Presumably the auditors will edge the remaining CSR consultancies and certification bodies out of the assurance market.”

On the other hand, Scott thinks enough companies will probably continue publishing, or connecting, CR reports even after they are required to switch to integrated reports. He says CR reports “are simply too useful to be abandoned.”

For more information contact Paul Scott, CorporateRegister.com, G18 Clerkenwell Workshops, 31 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1R 0AT, UK. Tel: +44 20 7014 3366; E-mail: paul@corporateregister.com.