For several years, The CPA Journal has covered sustainability and integrated reporting, exploring the various ways that nonfinancial information—including intellectual, human, social, and natural capital—materially impacts a company's bottom line, today and into the future. With a variety of standards to choose from and few regulatory guidelines that address reporting, users of such reports are sometimes left wondering how much of them represent substantive performance and how much reflect corporate self-promotion.

Assurance services have long been the accounting profession's most significant contribution to the public's trust in the financial markets. CPAs provide independent assurance that a company's financial statements fairly present an accurate assessment of its performance. Could the profession lend the same level of assurance on nonfinancial information?

The answer appears to be no—or at least, not yet. As noted by several articles in this month's issue, the profession has a long way to go before a CPA's assurance of a sustainability report carries the same weight as the traditional independent audit report. Art Radin read a wide variety of assurance statements on sustainability reports and found a lack of consistency in form and content. Michael Kraten took a closer look at a few high-profile cases and found that the limited assurance letters in sustainability reports may have even more significant limitations than users expect. Finally, Lawrence Kalbers provides a more detailed analysis of the Volkswagen emissions scandal. He raises the question of whether the company's auditors and attorneys should have known better—whether they should have uncovered the charade Volkswagen's management was using to deceive stakeholders about the true state of the company's efforts in the sustainability arena.