Background: On the 21st of April 2021, the EU Commission declared the adoption of Directive (EU) 2022/2464. This directive will significantly increase reporting requirements for companies within its scope. To this date, these sustainability standards are the most comprehensive yet and they aim to foster sustainability reporting quality. However, the concept of quality is multidimensional and empirical evidence related to SRQ and mandatory reporting standards are ambiguous. However, this new directive has not yet been researched thoroughly. Considering it will disrupt the way companies conduct their sustainability reporting, it would foster a research contribution to explore the effects the directive will have on SRQ.  Purpose: This thesis seeks to measure the compliance with, and quality of, the cross- cutting and topical standards derived from Directive (EU) 2022/2464 in large Swedish companies.  Method: The applied research method is quantitative with a deductive approach, where a hypothesis was generated based on existing literature on sustainability reporting quality. Data was collected from annual and sustainability reports of 45 companies. To measure CSRD compliance and the quality index, content analysis has been used. This facilitates transposition of qualitative information to quantitative data. The data was analysed using the statistical program SPSS.  Results: The results from the study show a significant positive relationship between compliance with CSRD and all the dependent variables of measuring the quality of sustainability reporting. Furthermore, the study shows that the average degree of compliance with CSRD requirements is currently 34% in the population, where the highest achieved score was 58% and the lowest achieved score was 7%.

The aim of the study is to analyze how Swedish large fashion companies' sustainability reports quality has been changed 2016-2019. The study wants to create a deeper understanding of the legislative change initiated by the EU that Sweden introduced in 2017. Quality is declared to consist of the three categories of credibility, content and communication. The study's issue was: “How has the quality of fashion companies' sustainability reports been affected when they became statutory to be produced?”. The sample consisted of 14 companies. Some of the companies prepared joint sustainability reports which led to the number of sustainability reports that the study analyzed being 10 reports per year 2016–2019. An additional report was added for 2019 when a company chose to prepare a report separately from the parent company. A qualitative content analysis was used as a method to study the selected 41 sustainability reports. The theories and concepts used in the study for analysis were triple bottom line, institutional theory, stakeholder theory, signal theory and GRI. The results showed that companies' quality of sustainability reports have changed both in accordance with the EU Directive 2014/95/EU, but largely due to surrounding factors. The study has provided a deeper understanding of companies' sustainability reporting and shown that there is no unambiguous change in quality when sustainability reporting for larger companies became mandatory by law.