The importance and significance of Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) became the centre of attention once again after corporate scandals such as Enron, WorldCom and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which was accompanied with the crash of the global financial market. In addition, after the British Petroleum oil spill disaster many environmental issues were raised and many concerns from the side of environmentalists like Greenpeace. All these events have strengthened the discussion on the CSR issues and made it clear that some urgent new regulations to deal with the situation should be made. In general, this paper seeks to add some clarity to the field of Corporate Social Responsibility and CSR reporting. However, the main goal of this paper is to prove that today CSR reporting is an important issue for corporations, governments and society. This paper also answers the questions why CSR is important and why the companies are motivated to report. These answers are gained through an analysis of the relevant academic literature with help of the statistical data and are illustrated with real world example: the CSR report of the German telecommunication company Deutsche Telekom AG. The results highlight that there are few supporting arguments that show that CSR reporting is important to companies, government and society. Although there are many problems and stumbling points in CSR reporting, which are also partially presented and discussed in this paper, the CSR reporting is of large interest and still growing.