Several barriers stand in the way of companies effectively reporting sustainability information and connecting this with financial information. 

Barriers include:

• Scarce expertise — the expertise to develop an appropriate organisational context is both scarce and expensive.
• Economic pressures — most companies are resource limited and the resources required for corporate reporting will be competing with resources required for business survival and revitalisation.
• Assurance and compliance overheads — such corporate reports will need to be assured and, in many cases, comply with regulation and legislation, placing additional burdens on already stretched internal assurance and compliance resources.
• Capacity constraints — sustainability reporting, unlike traditional compliance reporting, will require a whole-business approach as reported targets are promised and plans scrutinised. This organisation-wide transformation requires the building of bridges between the business silos and the institutionalisation of integrated thinking.

• No standards or best practices — the sustainability reporting discipline is fluid with international sustainability reporting standards still in development. The result is that no management system standards or best practices are able to be developed. Without a massive collaborative effort, every organisation is going to have to learn how-to independently.
• Increasing social demands — the world simply does not have the time available to allow for best practice sustainability reporting management and governance systems to emerge from independent efforts around the world. Organisations need to be equipped to publish comparable, assurable and repeatable decision-useful digital sustainability information as soon as possible.