The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive is a sustainability reporting directive that prescribes how companies should report on sustainability. The CSRD aims to increase the transparency of ESG performance of companies and to make information more reliable and better comparable.

As part of the Omnibus package, the following adjustments have been proposed:

• Reduction of scope of companies required to report: all companies with up to 1000 employees and €50 million turnover are outside of scope of the CSRD. This means a reduction of an estimated 80% of companies in scope of CSRD
• Protection of small-medium enterprises: smaller companies are protected from excessive information requests that they receive when included in the value chain of larger companies and from financial institutions, such as banks
• Reduction of EU Taxonomy obligations: for companies with more than 1000 employees and a turnover below €450m, it will become voluntary to report Taxonomy
• New voluntary standards: companies that are currently outside the scope of CSRD and EU Taxonomy, can choose to report according to the voluntary reporting standards of EFRAG, the so-called voluntary standards for SMEs (VSME). Companies in scope for CSRD cannot request more information from smaller, out-of-scope companies than prescribed in these voluntary standards
• Revision of ESRS standards: the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRSs) are being revised with the aim of substantially reducing the number of data points, clarifying provisions deemed unclear, improving consistency with other pieces of legislation and reducing the number of data points
• Deletion of sector-specific standards: these were still under development and will not be required for reporting
• Removed ‘reasonable assurance’ standard: the auditor can assess according to the principle of ‘limited assurance’ and does not have to provide a higher level of assurance
• Postponement of reporting requirements: the Omnibus package proposes postponing the the reporting requirements for large companies that have not yet started implementing the CSRD and for listed SMEs (wave 2 and 3) for two years. This should give co-legislators time to agree to proposed changes of the Omnibus.