Since the emergence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the 1950s, it has been vigorously debated whether companies should be involved in CSR activities and whether they should be required to produce reports on such activities, also known as sustainability reports (Carroll and Shabana, 2010). Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman (Friedman, 1970) was one of many who argued that ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud’. However, this view of company operations attracted intense criticism arguing that companies should have social accountability and morality in their operations (see Freeman, 1984; Elkington, 2001) and embrace a more holistic perspective of their responsibilities in which a broad range of stakeholders are given consideration (Deegan, 2010). The mega corporate collapses in the early 2000s, and in particular the collapse of Enron, WorldCom, HIH Insurance and Parmalat, have drawn public attention to responsible company behaviour (Pedrini, 2007), including issues of good governance, ethics, responsibility and trust (Marsiglia and Falautano, 2005), as well as the need to provide relevant information to investors and other stakeholders (Clarke and Dean, 2007). One of the causes of these collapses has been attributed to ethical breakdowns, rather than simply auditing failures (Parker, 2005). While these incidents have given rise to the imposition of regulations requiring companies to increase accountability and restore the public trust, there has been a parallel development of environmental regulations that require companies to provide additional information to relevant stakeholders. For example, the Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Guidelines, ISO 14001, the Accountability Assurance Standards 1000 and 1000S, Social Accountability (SA) 8000 and the International Standard on Assurance Engagements (ISAE) 3000 require companies to prepare sustainability reports. Furthermore, there is legislation in developed countries that encourages companies to pursue efficient environmental strategies and make related disclosures. For example, in the United States, ‘The National Environmental Policy Act 1970’ (NEPA 1970), the ‘Energy Policy Act 2005’, the ‘American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009’ and a provision in the ‘Sarbanes Oxley Act 2002’ that require companies to take into account environmental issues, such as by calculating environmental costs and other related disclosures (De Villiers, Naiker and van Staden, 2011). Other countries have developed similar measures: in Canada, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act 1999 (CEPA 1999) and the ‘Canada Labour Code’; in Australia, ‘The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999′ (EPBC Act 1999), the ‘National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007’ and the ‘Emissions Trading Scheme 2012’; and in the United Kingdom, the ‘Environmental Protection Act 1990’.