The importance and significance of Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Accounting and Taxes, grade: 1,3, Martin Luther University, language: English, abstract: Recently Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) gained pretty much attention in the media and in the business world, mostly because of the corporate scandals, like of Enron or Lehman Brothers, financial market crisis and environmental concerns as well as sequential discussion of CSR and CSR reporting on different levels. This paper answers the questions if CSR reporting is important and significant topic and if so, then why it is important and why the companies are motivated to report. These answers are gained through analysis of the relevant academic literature, with the help of the statistical data and are illustrated with the real world example, CSR report of German telecommunication company Deutsche Telekom AG. The results present that there are few supporting arguments that show that CSR reporting is important to the companies, society and government. 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 a large interest and is still growing.