Global Policy Forum

By Robert E. Sullivan

With modern, and widely accepted international accounting procedures, anyone in most any part of the world can glance at a simple statement to take the measure of a company. Why not a similar system for a company's social and environmental record, accepted worldwide? Why not indeed? Or so asks the people of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). And they are well on their way to getting their objective. Some 35 percent of the world's largest companies are already releasing environmental reports anyway, according to Bob Massie, of GRI, so why not standardize them?

Massie, whose real job is executive director of CERES, a coalition of 60 ivestment environment, religious, labor and social justice organizations, has been leading the GRI drive to get a single, universally accepted formula that all companies would use to report their record on social concerns. He said some 21 companies including Ford and General motors have already tested GRI pilot formula which, among other things aim to have concrete and understandable definitions for such terms as "emissions," "effluent", "community development," and even "human rights."

While in New York preparing for a meeting of executives from some 75 companies from 35 countries precisely this subject, Massie, agreed to an interview with Earth Times. "The situation is parallel to the early 19th century recently in an interview in New York, " Companies made reports, but different kinds of reports, and limited them to insider groups ups." Gradually the business world cobbled together a system in which everyone would know what everyone else meant by such simple terms as "assets", "value", or "depreciation," he said, and now that system is monitored by the Financial Audit Service bureau (FASB).

That's what GRI wants to do with social issues, he said. Corporations might want to participate, he said, because "companies are getting showered for requests for information on their social practices and they might welcome an agreement for one statement instead of filling out 200 questionnaires from 200 groups each of which do not accept the questionnaire of the other." Massie said that companies who have been burned by criticism of their social policies and who wanted to change, could use the system internally as well, spelling out specifically what their goals are in terms that everyone, including the managers in branches around the world, would know exactly what they meant.

"It would be better than sending out a memo," he said. The advantage to environmentalists, he said, was the "creation of expectation" in that once a large number of companies begin to use the reporting system, the question becomes to the others, "why not?" "If GM and Ford use, it, and they do," Massie said, "why not Daimler -Chrysler?"

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