The Impact of Audit Firm Industry Specialization on the Relationship between Integrated Reporting and Sustainability Performance: Conceptual Paper

The current study recognizes the importance of sustainability, so it selects two factors that have long been called for to achieve business success: integrated reporting and external auditor quality.Integrated reporting has emerged as a result of the ongoing efforts to integrate environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure into the traditional report.An audit firm's industry specialisation has long been considered a vital indicator of audit quality.Although integrated reporting and audit firm industry specializations are important according to the intended and desired goals, their impact is not well established, according to previous studies.Accordingly, this study recommends that future empirical studies verify the interactive effect of vital factors instead of verifying the impact of each factor individually.This study expects that the interactive effect of integrated reporting and audit firm industry specializations on sustainability will be strongly significant.In other words, this study expects that sustainability performance-whether financial sustainability performance or ESG performance-will be strongly enhanced in the presence of industry-specialist auditors supervising integrated reports.