Balanço social: avaliação de informações fornecidas por empresas industriais situadas no estado de Santa Catarina

Abstract

The Social Audit is a statement that was created with a view to disclosing the social responsibility of organizations. This instrument, which has been widely discussed, provides users with accounting information regarding the organizations' internal policies on the human promotion of employees and the quality of life in organizations; the formation and distribution of wealth; the organizations' attitude in relation to the environment and spontaneous contributions to the community. In Brazil, the preparation of the Social Audit is still not mandatory and there are no official models or indicators for disclosing the data. However, an increasing number of organizations from various sectors are adopting the practice, including the companies analyzed in this research. This study provides a review on the concepts and indicators of the aforementioned report and, basically, evaluates the content of the information provided by the largest companies (by number of employees) in the state of Santa Catarina. The results reveal that Social Audits have been used by companies throughout the State. However, they use different models; disclose the indicators in a wide variety of forms; omit important information and provide data for two periods only, as a result of which Social Audits are not as useful to the users as they potentially could be.