Abstract:

According to the Directive 2014/95/EU, large public interest entities (PIEs) must disclose i.a. a description of their business model, policies regarding environmental, social and employee matters, as well as non-financial key performance indicators (KPIs). KPI selection and disclosure pose significant challenges, especially for these PIEs, which have just started to provide non-financial information. The aim of the paper is to investigate the practice of large PIEs operating in Poland as regards non-financial disclosures, with particular focus on KPIs, and to identify the room for improvement of the effectiveness of the practice in question. Our sample consists of 169 public companies operating in Poland required to provide non-financial disclosures according to the new accounting law. The data was hand collected from the corporate non-financial statements published in 2019. Research findings indicate that companies present a wide variety of KPIs in a manner that makes their effective comparison difficult. We believe that our study contributes to the literature on corporate reporting, as it provides new insights into non-financial KPIs disclosures in a new institutional setting.