Internal Control Quality, Sustainability Reporting Breadth, and ESG Rating Disagreement: Evidence from Chinese Listed Firms

Persistent disagreement among environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rating providers limits the comparability of corporate sustainability assessments but does not, by itself, indicate rating inaccuracy. This study examines whether firm-level internal control quality and sustainability reporting breadth are associated with cross-provider ESG rating disagreement. The dataset contains 40,310 firm-year observations for Chinese A-share listed firms from 2009 to 2023. The principal specifications hold provider identity constant using ratings from Huazheng and CNRDS and normalize scores within provider-year distributions. Firm and year fixed effects are included, with standard errors clustered at the firm level. Internal control quality is negatively associated with ESG rating disagreement across the principal and alternative specifications. In the main percentile-based model, a one-standard-deviation increase in internal control quality is associated with a 0.0098 decrease in disagreement, equivalent to 3.16% of the dependent-variable mean and 4.43% of its standard deviation. The association is therefore statistically systematic but economically modest. Internal control quality is also positively associated with sustainability reporting breadth, whereas reporting breadth is positively associated with contemporaneous rating disagreement. These relationships are examined as separate conditional associations rather than as evidence of a mediated effect. Coverage diagnostics, fixed-provider samples, alternative rating transformations, alternative internal-control measures, and text-based validation of reporting breadth indicate that the principal ICQ result is not attributable solely to changes in provider composition or measurement construction. Lagged specifications preserve the negative ICQ association in the fixed-two-provider models, while the SRB estimates are more sensitive to normalization and timing. The evidence suggests that stronger internal information discipline is associated with modestly lower ESG rating disagreement, whereas broader reporting may increase the scope for provider-specific interpretation when the disclosed information is insufficiently standardized or comparable.