A board that does not know precisely which reporting obligations apply is not in a neutral position. Ignorance is not a pause button. Obligations continue to run, deadlines pass, and the question of whether someone was responsible for something is usually only asked after something has gone wrong. This page is about what that uncertainty costs, not in a monetary amount, but in the form of risks that accumulate as long as there is no overview.
Without a current picture of which obligations apply, the answer to three follow-up questions is also missing: who owns which obligation, what evidence exists that the obligation is being met, and which control checks that the evidence is correct. Together, these three elements form the difference between a board that says it is in control and a board that can demonstrate it. What that demonstration looks like in practice is described on the page about how a board demonstrates that it is in control. Without that substantiation, every statement about compliance is an assumption, not a finding.
Companies generally do not discover on their own that there is a gap in their overview of obligations. That happens through an external party: an auditor, a customer performing due diligence, a supervisory authority, or a journalist. By that time, the question is no longer whether an obligation applied, but why it wasn't looked into earlier. Part of these surprises can be traced back to the same pattern, which is explained on the page about why companies are surprised by legislation: rules that appear to be fixed at European level nevertheless land differently than expected through national implementation. Anyone who only looks at the European text misses exactly the part that has been filled in locally.
A common reason why companies think they are covered is that a policy document exists. A policy document describes an intention; it says nothing about what actually happens. The difference between the two is addressed on the page about the difference between policy and practice. For a register of obligations, that distinction is essential: an obligation that is assigned to a role on paper, but in practice is not actively maintained by anyone, does not produce evidence. It only produces a document that does not hold up under scrutiny.
The Compliance Check maps out which obligations, based on the available information, appear to be relevant, and links an owner, evidence, and control to each obligation. That is a structure, not a guarantee. The method does not replace legal advice on specific articles, thresholds, or deadlines; these change, differ per situation, and should not appear in a generic tool without verification. What the method does do is sharpen the question: what determines whether an obligation applies to your organization, and where is the current text with which that can be verified. That 'what determines it' is valuable in itself, because it prevents a board from acting on a assumption rather than a verified fact.
Nor is it a one-time exercise. Obligations change due to amendments to legislation, growth or contraction of the organization, new activities, or new markets. How often a register of obligations needs maintenance depends on how many of these factors move at the same time; this is explained on the page about how often a register of obligations changes. A register that was drawn up once and never updated afterwards eventually becomes just as unreliable as having no register at all.
Which obligations apply depends in practice heavily on two things that board members sometimes assess too quickly: the sector in which the organization is active and the size of the organization. Both determine not only whether a rule applies, but also which exceptions, transitional periods, or additional requirements apply. How sector influences that outcome is described on the page about how your sector determines which ESG rules apply, and how size influences that outcome is described on the page about how your size determines which ESG rules apply. Both factors can apply at the same time, which is exactly why a generic assessment rarely suffices.
The Compliance Check is under development. There is not yet an environment in which an organization can independently build a complete overview of obligations today. Anyone who wants to use this once it becomes available can sign up for the waiting list. This is not an offer to deliver something now, but an honest statement of affairs: the tool described here does not yet exist in finished form, and will only be offered once it deserves that name.
A register of obligations makes clear which reporting obligations apply and who is responsible for them, but it says nothing yet about how much time it actually takes to meet those obligations. That question, how much of the underlying work is repeatable enough to hand over to AI, is a natural extension of this page and is answered by the work scan of FTE TO AI, which calculates per task which part of the work qualifies for that.
Vraag maar welke verplichting op u van toepassing is, en waaraan u dat kunt aantonen.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.