Social and environmental accountability has joined financial accountability in the new “triple bottom line,” according to KPMG LLP. A recent report from the firm states that Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are increasingly facing questions of sustainability as a wide array of stakeholders demand a greater accounting of an organization’s broader impact.

According to KPMG, the CFO’s role in ensuring the accuracy of financial reporting has now evolved to applying that same rigour to a much broader array of non-financial information in an organization’s corporate responsibility and sustainability reports.

“If an organization loses a major customer because of a failure to pass a sustainability assessment, current and future financial losses must be disclosed,” said Bill Murphy, National Leader of Climate Change and Sustainability at KPMG Canada. “The recent Canadian Securities Administrators’ Staff Notice on Environmental Reporting is just one example of how sustainability reporting has become a need to have, not a nice to have.”

The report CFOs and the triple bottom line points to the growing need for a CFO to be involved in the creation of credible non-financial information. Sustainability reporting requires pertinent data sources to be identified and internal controls to be developed, and there could be long-term consequences for organizations that do not take a thorough approach. For example, more than 3,000 major companies now report through the Carbon Disclosure Project, a global organization that acts on behalf of 534 institutional investors that represent $64 trillion in managed assets.

Sustainability challenges Canadian executives to think about business performance not only over the next year, but over the coming decades, which is why leaders in sustainability are also leaders in innovation; they are constantly considering the long-range impacts of their operation. The triple bottom line of social, environmental, and financial impacts will indicate how well a company is prepared to face the changing landscape.

KPMG has already begun taking measures to ensure it is prepared for that future. In October 2010, it was the first Canadian accounting firm to receive its initial ISO 14065 accreditation from the American National Standards Institute. The accreditation confirms that KPMG’s Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Assurance Program meets the best recognized test of quality in the sector.