Sustainability & CSR Excellence: The Real Challenges of Sustainability Reporting under the CSRD
Marius Brînzea – Strategy Director, Reciclad`OR
• We now have a recently adopted Directive, Directive 794/2025, which takes effect starting April 17, 2025. In its initial phase, it has pushed forward the reporting deadlines for a wide range of companies. By December 31, 2025, all national legislations in the EU must align with this postponement of reporting deadlines.
• The European Parliament has requested the Commission to conduct an analysis of three documents from three different periods – the CSRD Directive, the CSDDD Directive, and the Taxonomy Regulation. This request was triggered by concerns over overlaps and redundancies, which are adding further complexity to the reporting process.
• The Omnibus Package has three clearly defined directions. The first is to reduce the pressure on economic operators by lowering the number of companies required to comply with reporting procedures and decreasing reporting frequency. The second is to eliminate legal redundancies and overlaps by creating a coherent legal framework at the EU level. The third, equally important, is to clarify, reassess, and simplify the reporting standards. I would like to highlight that the Omnibus proposals also include measures aimed at protecting small and medium-sized enterprises from excessive data requests across the value chain by large corporations or financial institutions.
• As a consultant, I support the swift adoption of the Omnibus proposals, with the goal of simplifying reporting and preserving the competitiveness of European industry. At Reciclad`OR, it took our team a year and a half to understand and decipher the CSRD requirements—including those from EFRAG—down to the level of topics, subtopics, and data points. There are approximately 1,350 data points. Why did it take so long? Because the Directive itself is poorly written, the data points are convoluted and overly complex—so much so that we found ourselves translating Romanian into Romanian.
• In reality, governance is the key to the process, because governance will determine both the timeline for reporting and the accuracy of the data provided. This is due to the involvement of multiple departments within the reporting company. The double materiality assessment has been left by EFRAG to the discretion of the reporting entities—but even this assessment needs to be audited.
Source: revista-piata.ro
