The Financial Supervisory Commission (the FSC) issued “The Roadmap for Taiwan listed companies to align with IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards” on August 17, 2023, and established a taskforce to promote alignments with IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards. The taskforce consists of four sub-groups, with the Securities and Futures Bureau (the SFB) of the FSC, the Taiwan Stock Exchange (the TWSE), the Accounting Research and Development Foundation (the ARDF), and the Taipei Exchange (the TPEx) respectively serving as conveners. In gathering external opinions for policy promotion, the SFB has instructed the TWSE and TPEx to extensively collect feedback from 150 TWSE-listed and 88 TPEx-listed companies through questionnaire surveys. Following in-depth discussions and deliberations in the meetings of Group II, the first Q&A version was completed and released on September 18, 2023 in the “IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards Alignment Area” (https://isds.tpex.org.tw).

The TWSE stated that the first version Q&A of aligning with IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards comprises nine questions, covering issues such as: difficulties in the timing of early disclosure of annual reports; industry classification applicable to diversified enterprises; inconsistent greenhouse gas inventory standards; climate-related information disclosure and scenario analysis; overlapping information between the sustainability reports and annual reports; and insufficient affirmation capacity in sustainability information. In the future, the TWSE and TPEx will continue collecting concerns from various sectors and update the contents of the Q&A to facilitate the smooth transition of TWSE- and TPEx- listed companies to comply with IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards.

The TWSE serves as the convener of “Group II: Adoption of IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards” in order to ease the regulatory authorities’ promotion of IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards, and assist in addressing the pain points of enterprise transition. The task is to collect and analyze issues and impacts related to the transition to IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards.  This includes supporting enterprises in solving issues related to applicable standards, developing practical examples and guidelines, preparing reference examples for adoption plans, and controlling the adoption schedule of enterprises.  The goal is to successfully achieve the task of assisting enterprises in smoothly aligning with international standards through the efforts of the working group.