Assurance

Mission & Goals

The Assurance Initiative of The Sustainability Consortium is concerned with both the process and the outcomes of standards (both the development and reporting) to identify environmental and social impacts of products produced and sold globally.

The Assurance Initiative works to advise, counsel, and support The Sustainability Consortium to develop product-level sustainability measurement and reporting standards (criteria) that will lead to information that is objective, measureable, complete, relevant, verifiable, and comparable. The scope of this project includes assurance of both business-to-business reporting and claims made to stakeholders.

The current goal of the Assurance Initiative is to provide timely, accurate, and useful information to the sector working groups to support the verifiability of product-level reporting. This includes partnering with the sector working groups to provide assurance-related recommendations regarding existing and planned sources of data to be used in product-level reporting.

The Assurance Initiative will, where possible, further the progress of audit and assurance best practices in the area of sustainability, specifically product-level reporting processes, practices, and standards.

Participants

  • KPMG
  • NSF International
  • UL Environment
  • University of Arkansas

Working Group Contact

Rebecca Miles

Assurance Manager

University of Arkansas

Send an Email

Quick Facts
  • Assurance services are independent professional services that improve the quality of information or its context for decision makers. The outcome of this service is for internal use and does not include an external report. Assurance services are commonly referred to as verification services.
  • Attestation includes engagements in which a practitioner is hired to issue, or does issue, a report on subject matter or an assertion about the subject matter that is the responsibility of another party (SSAE).
  • Auditing is the systematic process of objectively obtaining and evaluating evidence regarding assertions about economic activities and events to ascertain the degree of correspondence between the assertions and established criteria and communicate the results to interested users (American Accounting Association).