How do we prepare for assurance without a sustainability team?

You need three things and only one has to sit inside your business: someone to retrieve data from your own systems, someone who knows what evidence the assurance standard requires, and a governance record. The first is a retrieval task for finance, the second can be bought, and the third is a discipline rather than a headcount. A first-year filing is a defined project, which is why a permanent hire is usually the wrong first move.

What does an assurance provider actually test in year one?

In year one they test the disclosures inside the ASSA 5010 first-year scope: Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, governance disclosures, and specified strategy paragraphs on climate risks and opportunities. The work runs in a predictable order, from understanding your reporting process and your boundary, through sampling source documents and reperforming calculations, to written representations at the end.

What will our auditor actually ask for?

In year one they ask for evidence behind the disclosures that are actually assured: Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, your governance disclosures, and the specified strategy paragraphs on climate risks and opportunities. In practice that means source documents, a calculation they can rebuild from those documents, and minutes showing the governance you described actually happened.

Glossary›Assurance, audit evidence and working papers›Assurance readiness review

Glossary term

Cluster A · A15

Tier 1 · differentiator

Assurance readiness review

Definition

An assurance readiness review is a structured check of a climate disclosure file before the assurance provider starts. It tests whether every disclosed number traces to evidence, whether judgements are documented, whether controls exist, and whether the file would survive the procedures the assurer will run. It is not assurance and gives no conclusion.

No governing instrument

· practice ·

Practice

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In practice
What the assurer does with it
Commonly confused with
Sources
Related terms
Related questions

Cluster

A · Assurance, audit evidence and working papers, 47 terms

In practice

The value is timing. Findings raised before the engagement can be fixed by going back to source. The same findings raised during the engagement arrive when the source data is months old, the people who collected it have moved on, and the lodgement date is fixed by section 319 of the Corporations Act.

A readiness review worth doing looks like the assurance engagement run early: sample the disclosed figures, walk them back to source, test the boundary against the asset and lease registers, reconcile to the general ledger, read the basis of preparation against the disclosures, and check that every significant judgement has a documented owner and rationale. A readiness review not worth doing is a checklist of AASB S2 requirements with ticks against them, which tests whether you wrote something, not whether it is supported.

What the assurer does with it

Nothing directly, and that matters. A readiness review performed by a third party is not evidence and the assurer will not rely on it. Its only function is to reduce the number of findings the assurer raises. If the readiness review was performed by the firm that will assure the report, that is an independence question, because reviewing your own readiness advice is a self-review threat.

Commonly confused with

“Pre-assurance” or a dry run offered by the assurance firm itself, which carries the independence issue above; and a gap assessment, which tests disclosure completeness against the standard rather than evidence sufficiency.