Sustainability Assurance Quality and the Effect of the Audit Committee : A study of Sweden

Abstract: There is an increasing need for companies to act more responsibly in sustainability related issues due to pressures from their stakeholders. This increased pressure comes with a corresponding need for companies to report on their actions. As the stakeholders of companies do not have the opportunity to assess the credibility of the reporting themselves, the responsibility falls upon a third party to give assurance on the contents of the report. The assurance of such will be an important part in providing reliability to the sustainability work and report. One important corporate governance function responsible for overseeing the sustainability reporting and the assurance thereof is the audit committee. Therefore, this study will examine the effect of audit committee characteristics on the quality of sustainability assurance. Due to the novelty of the concept of sustainability assurance and as not many previous studies have addressed the issue of the quality, the authors proposed the following research question: “How do audit committee characteristics influencesustainability assurance quality?”. The findings from the study are analyzed through the shareholder-stakeholder theory, legitimacy theory, agency theory and the resource dependency theory. The shareholder-stakeholder and legitimacy theory are used to analyze the audit committees role as a governance function and the agency and resource dependency theory are applied to the different characteristics. This quantitative study includes data from the top 100 publicly listed companies in Sweden with a separate audit committee appointed by and amongst the board. The study uses observations from the fiscal year 2021, with data collected through content analysis. This thesis is conducted under a positivist paradigm, with a deductive approach. The data is tested through OLS regression, and the analysis is conducted with grounds in previous literature and theory. The results of this study are in some respects in line with a previous study but has also found differing results. Companies with audit committees with at least one member with industry expertise are more likely to have higher quality assurance on their sustainability report. Apart from the previous study, this study did not find a significant relationship of the independence and meeting frequency of audit committees. A significant relationship was neither found to the gender diversity, size, or experience of audit committees. Therefore, the authors can conclude that the research question is answered and that the results indicate that the audit committee may not be the best explanatory basis for the quality of sustainability assurance.