What if the auditing profession has been slowly drifting away from its own purpose and ESG assurance is the way back?
That is not a provocative framing. It is, more or less, how Wim Nienhuis, co-founder of Verda Assurance, sees the moment the profession finds itself in. We sat down with him to explore what the shift from shareholder to stakeholder value really means for auditors, and why independent assurance on sustainability information matters far beyond regulatory compliance.
A model built for a narrower world
For much of the last century, the purpose of an audit was built around a particular idea of who a company is accountable to. A company produces financial statements, an independent auditor verifies them, and shareholders and lenders can trust what they read. Clean, contained, and focused on one primary group of stakeholders.
The problem is that companies affect far more than their shareholders. Employees, communities, the environment, future generations who have no vote in today’s decisions but will live with their consequences. These stakeholders were always there. Their interests simply did not appear in the formal record of what a company had done and for a long time, that went largely unquestioned.
“Financial assurance was invented to increase trust between parties who interact in the world,” Wim explains. “In the Netherlands there was always also a broader idea: that an organisation is part of society, and that society has a right to know how it is behaving.” That original purpose, he argues, has never changed. What has changed is the scope of what organisations are expected to account for.
From one stakeholder to many
Shareholder value as a guiding principle is not wrong but it is incomplete. It measures what flows to one group of people over a short to medium time horizon, and says little about what a company takes from the world, what it leaves behind, or whether it will still be viable in twenty years. “If you only steer and measure on financial information,” Wim says, “you are ultimately not contributing to a better world. And you are probably not securing your own long-term future either.”
Stakeholder value asks a harder set of questions. Whether employees find meaning and support in their work. Whether customers are genuinely served. Whether communities benefit from a company’s presence. And whether future generations, the silent stakeholders as Wim calls them, are being considered at all. It is a more demanding standard, and a more honest one.
The case for independent verification
Expanding the scope of reporting is only the first step. Without independent auditing, sustainability reporting risks becoming a communication exercise, one where organisations tell the story they want to tell, data is curated, and ambitions are presented as achievements. This is what greenwashing is, and it is not always deliberate.
“An auditor is an intermediary between a company and society,” Wim says. “Their job is to ensure that the information being shared is reliable, in the interest of the people who use it. That is as true for ESG information as it has always been for financial information.” The parallel with financial auditing history is striking: independent checks on financial reporting emerged partly in response to abuses and scandals that eroded public trust. ESG assurance is beginning to serve the same function for sustainability claims.
The value also goes beyond external credibility. When an organisation knows its sustainability data will be examined, it pays closer attention to that data. Processes improve, gaps get identified before they become problems, and the audit process itself tends to make organisations better over time. “It is not just a stamp at the end,” Wim says. “The process itself creates value.”
A profession rediscovering its purpose
The shift from shareholder to stakeholder value makes the work of an auditor more complex, with more interests to hold at once and more tension to navigate. But also, Wim suggests, more meaningful. “If you are ultimately just helping someone else make more money, that feels rather superficial. When your work contributes to something bigger, it changes everything.”
This is perhaps the most important dimension of what ESG assurance represents for the profession: not just a new set of standards to apply, but a reconnection with the reason auditing exists in the first place. Building trust. Serving the public interest. Ensuring that the information flowing through society is reliable enough to act on.
“There is a sense of vocation in being an accountant,” Wim says. “ESG makes that sharper. It clarifies why you do what you do. You are a link in a larger chain that ultimately contributes to the world our children will inherit.” The shift from shareholder to stakeholder value is not a departure from the auditing profession’s core purpose. For Wim, it is a return to it.
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