Advanced Financial Accounting (The FASB and IASB) Essay

Advanced Financial Accounting (The FASB and IASB) - Essay Example Overview of CSR reporting Corporate social responsibility has been an integral part of corporate functions since time immemorial. It is very difficult to trace the roots of the phenomenon or how it all started but one fact is clear that corporate social responsibility has come to stay with the corporate world. Perhaps the undeniable fact is that the benefits of undertaking corporate social responsibility cuts across several quarters of business functioning including to the ordinary customer or citizen who lives in the neighbourhood of a given company. A clear instance can be given as a multinational company that makes regular end of year donation to given Children’s Hospital in all countries where they have their branches. In such a situation, the ordinary citizen in the said country will benefit from the donations that are done to hospital but the benefit will not end there as the publicity that the company will receive from the media by way of broadcasting their donations as well as the good will that beneficiaries will develop will lead to the eventual expansion of the company in terms of the company’s customer base. ... Identifying the parties involved in corporate social responsibility as stakeholders, Haddija (2006) state that the only way that stakeholders can be assured that companies are interested in corporate social responsibility not just because of their share of the benefit is to implement and effective corporate social responsibility reporting system. The role of stakeholders in CSR Reporting There are three major stakeholders who can be identified as far as corporate social responsibility reporting are concerned. These stakeholders are staff and managers of companies, shareholders of companies and beneficiaries of corporate social responsibility. Each of these stakeholders have very important roles to play as far as corporate social responsibility reporting is concerned that cannot be compromised in anyway (Prempeh, 2008). Management and Staff In the first place, the staff and managers of various organisations who undertake corporate social responsibilities are enshrined to keep comprehe nsive data at three stages of any corporate social responsibility project. These three stages are pre-implementation, implementation and post-implementation stages. Before any corporate social responsibility project is undertaken, the leadership of the institution is expected to set a budget and planning team whose responsibility will be to estimate how much the company wishes to spend on the entire project. The planning and budget are integrated in such a way that the entire plan of what is expected to be achieved in the course of the corporate social responsibility project but have an even allocation of funding. The role of the planning and budget team and by extension the role of the staff and