The European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG) announced the launch of a call for expression of interest for companies and other stakeholders to engage on the application of the upcoming voluntary sustainability reporting standard by larger companies that are not in the scope of the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

The call comes as the European Commission is expected to adopt a new Voluntary Standard (VS) later this year, which it proposed as part of the Omnibus I initiative, which significantly reduced the number of companies covered by the mandatory sustainability reporting requirements of the CSRD.

Companies that are included in the scope of the CSRD are required to report in accordance with the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), developed – and recently revised and simplified – by EFRAG. While the CSRD initially applied to companies with more than 250 employees, the Omnibus process increased the threshold of companies covered by the regulation to exclude companies with less than 1,000 employees and €450 million in annual revenues, removing an estimated 90% of companies from the regulation’s sustainability reporting requirements.

Notably, a recent survey found that most companies that were removed from the scope of the CSRD plan to continue with their sustainability reporting activities despite the lack of regulatory compliance obligations.

The new VS will be based on the Voluntary Standard for SMEs (VSME) endorsed last year by the EU Commission. The VSME was released by EFRAG in 2024, prior to the launch of the Omnibus process, and designed for use by companies with less than 250 employees, which was the CSRD threshold at the time.

In its call for interest, EFRAG said that it will consider applications from EU companies that are not SMEs and have fewer than 1,000 employees or annual revenue of less than €450 million, as well as stakeholders including auditors, business associations, lenders, business partners, investors and other users of sustainability information. Engagement and research activities may include webinars, surveys, events and interviews to gain insight on how the upcoming voluntary standard could be applied in practice, and on how sustainability reporting is evolving across Europe.

EFRAG said:

“EFRAG has already in place a continuous dialogue with SMEs and the users of their reporting and is now willing to start a dialogue with non-SME companies that are outside the scope of the ESRS and may consider using the voluntary standard on a voluntary basis.”