The non- straightforward link between anti-corruption and CSR-reporting : A study assessing the quality of CSR disclosure regarding anti-corruption of four Swedish banks

In 2019, the two Swedish banks Swedbank and SEB was involved in what has been called one of the largest money laundry scandals. Money laundering is a critical sustainability issue for banks since their operations enable money from corrupt activities to be laundered into the financial system, hence diverts resources from education and health services. Corruption is a difficult topic to manage due to its invisible nature, making it hard to detect and measure compared to emissions or compliance with human rights. In the last decades, there has been an increasing demand for organizations to communicate their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) considerations. However, the flexibility allowed by standards and regulation in this area regarding what to disclose have been argued to undermine the reliability of CSR information. There have been discussions whether the banks had informed stakeholders about the anticorruption risks sufficiently, information that primarily should be communicated through sustainability and annual reports. Previous studies examining CSR reporting quality have found that companies present information in different ways, complicating a comparison of information. They have also found that such disclosure has been used as a strategy to highlight only the good work of a company and omit negative disclosures. This study examines the quality of CSR information that is communicated in annual and sustainability reports of the four largest banks operating in Sweden; Nordea, Handelsbanken, Swedbank, and SEB. Our focus is limited to disclosure about anti-corruption for which the Global reporting initiative (GRI) provides principles in terms of what they asses to be good content and quality. We will use these principles when structuring our categories in our qualitative content analysis with quantitative elements and when we analyse and make conclusions of our results regarding the quality. We use a content analysis model called the Consolidated Narrative Interrogation Model (CONI) which integrate both qualitative and quantitative measures of CSR reporting quality. Our result show that anti-corruption disclosure differs in terms of presentation structure, which requirements from GRI that are applied and how much information that is disclosed. The overall conclusion regarding its quality is that it does not meet the reporting quality principles stated in GRI 101: foundation. We find indications of strategic legitimacy in terms of how banks disclose anti-corruption activities which is critical for the overall reporting practise since its purpose it to constitute an accurate and reliable source of information to stakeholders