11 December 2025 — News
Views from the accountancy profession
The EU co-legislators have agreed on the European Commission’s (EC) Omnibus proposal to amend the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directives (CSDDD) rules bringing significant changes.
Accountancy Europe believes that reassessing requirements is an important aspect of good lawmaking. However, these revisions come during the first year of the CSRD implementation bringing legal uncertainty and additional burdens undermining trust in EU legislation. It is crucial to ensure legal certainty and stability. Member States should, therefore, transpose the Omnibus directive into national law promptly; swift, consistent implementation across the EU will be essential.
At the same time, the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) are undergoing revision to simplify and significantly reduce reporting requirements. We welcome EFRAG’s technical advice to the EC with the draft simplified ESRS as it delivers simpler and less granular standards. The EC should adopt a delegated act with the Amended ESRS that avoids further significant changes to provide stability in the reporting ecosystem and ensure that standards remain fit for purpose.
We share below our views on some key aspects of the agreed changes:
We regret to see the CSRD scope significantly reduced, going even beyond the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD), which limits the availability of comparable, reliable sustainability information to investors and stakeholders. These data gaps could affect investment decisions, slow progress towards the EU’s green objectives, and challenge the goal of a more competitive Europe. The CSRD was designed to enhance market transparency by ensuring that financial markets and stakeholders have access to consistent, comparable and reliable sustainability information.
Despite these changes, we are convinced that sustainability reporting practices will continue to develop, given the strategic importance of such information.
Sustainability data is crucial to manage risks and develop resilience strategies centred on low-carbon and circular business models which are key drivers of transition and competitiveness. Corporate sustainability reporting provides insights that can be integrated into a company’s management systems to uncover new opportunities and improve overall performance.
We welcome the decision that a voluntary SME standard should be the basis for the legal value chain cap, reducing the compliance burden for SMEs. For the value chain cap to be effective, the standard should follow as closely as possible the VSME standard developed by EFRAG without adding additional metrics and/or modules. Any similar changes would reduce the VSME’s effectiveness as the value chain cap and harm its market adoption by smaller businesses.
We welcome the co-legislators’ decision to adopt an EU limited assurance standard by 1 July 2027. A clear and unified EU approach to sustainability assurance is essential to facilitate greater consistency and alignment of assurance practices across EU Member States and globally.
We believe that the ISSA 5000 should form a baseline for a sustainability assurance standard in the EU. High-quality sustainability assurance is critical to reinforcing trust and ensuring comparable and useful disclosures across markets.
We welcome the decision to establish a dedicated portal through which undertakings may access information, guidance and support, including relevant reporting templates and guidance. We have long advocated for such portals for reporting and compliance purposes, including on sustainability, to bring together templates, resources, guidance. We encourage the EC to go even further by developing a pan-European, free to use carbon footprint calculator and other datapoint calculation tools, integrated as part of this portal.
