CSR reporting, stakeholder engagement and preventing hypocrisy through ethics audit

Since Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and business ethics are principles that sustainable organizations cannot ignore in the 21st century several international organizations (ILO, OECD, and EU) have established business, social and ethical standards and guidelines, which are no longer optional but mandatory. To earn stakeholders interests and fulfil the requirements of abovementioned regulation the corporate governance should be transparent and honest. The aim of current article is to introduce a new approach to the ethics audit which can provide to the stakeholders more adequate information about the company’s real values and CSR performances. This article describes a new approach to the ethics audit, improved by the author, which can help managers in evaluating how well the company has fulfilled its economic, legal and ethical obligations, discover or prevent ethical risks and plan CSR activities strategically to satisfy stakeholder interests. To avoid hypocrisy between declared values, mission and CSR reports corporate management should be transparent keeping in mind that decisions are made and enforced in a manner that follows the real rules and procedures. This article bases on author’s doctoral theses: Ethics audit: a management tool for assessing of corporate social responsibility and preventing ethical risks.