Value Reporting Foundation
- Countries: Global
- Function: Former umbrella for SASB and IIRC; now merged into IFRS/ISSB to support harmonization of sustainability reporting
The Value Reporting Foundation (VRF) was established in 2021 through the merger of two leading sustainability disclosure bodies: the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC). The VRF was designed as an umbrella organization to accelerate convergence among corporate reporting frameworks, bridging the divide between financial and sustainability-related disclosures to create a coherent and comprehensive system for communicating enterprise value creation.
The VRF’s formation reflected growing global recognition that fragmented ESG reporting standards created confusion for companies and investors.
By consolidating SASB’s industry-specific financially material standards with the IIRC’s broader Integrated Reporting (IR) Framework, the VRF provided a unified platform emphasizing:
- Financial materiality: Ensuring that sustainability factors material to enterprise value were clearly disclosed for investor decision-making.
- Integrated thinking: Promoting an understanding of how sustainability issues interact with financial and strategic outcomes across multiple capitals (financial, manufactured, natural, human, social, and intellectual).
The VRF’s purpose was not to create new standards from scratch but to harmonize existing best practices and support the evolution of a more streamlined global reporting architecture. It engaged extensively with other major initiatives such as the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB) to promote interoperability and comparability.
In 2022, the VRF was officially consolidated into the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation to contribute directly to the work of the newly created International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). The ISSB incorporated SASB’s industry-based approach to materiality and disclosure topics into its IFRS S1 (General Requirements for Disclosure of Sustainability-related Financial Information) and IFRS S2 (Climate-related Disclosures) standards.
The VRF’s merger into the IFRS Foundation represented a pivotal moment in the history of sustainability reporting, marking the beginning of an internationally coordinated effort to create a single set of sustainability disclosure standards for global capital markets.
The VRF’s intellectual legacy is visible in several aspects of the ISSB’s standards:
- The use of sector-specific guidance rooted in SASB’s 77 industry standards.
- The emphasis on connecting sustainability factors to enterprise value and financial materiality.
- The adoption of integrated reporting principles promoting long-term, interconnected thinking about financial and non-financial drivers of performance.
Although the VRF as an institution has been absorbed, its impact remains foundational in shaping the ongoing transformation of corporate reporting practices toward a more integrated and sustainability-informed capital market infrastructure.