Corporate social accounting and accounts: a duty of accountability

Over the last ten to fifteen years, there has been increasing research, practical implementation and normative consideration of the issues related corporate social responsibility, including the social accounting practices. Social accounting and accounts represent fundamental components of ‘corporate accountability systems’, which connect an organization to its stakeholders and society at large. In particular, in the context of these ‘accountability systems’, social accounting and accounts play a pivotal role because these provide information on which stakeholders assess the extent to which an organization accomplishes its obligations and behaves in a responsible manner. The contention of this paper is that the decision of implementing social accounting and producing/ disclosing social accounts to the public is an ‘ethically-grounded duty’, i.e. the ‘duty’ of providing a honest, truthful, transparent and fair account ‘for and on’ the actions undertaken (or not) by an organization and the results of these actions. In addition, how, and the extent to which, social accounting (and accounts) is (are) related to financial accounting and how these ‘two accountings’ are part of the wider ‘corporate accountability systems’ is also discussed.