Rolls-Royce Audits For Accountability

Dec. 21, 2004

The 2003 environmental report from London-based Rolls-Royce Group PLC, released in mid-April of this year, is replete with goals set, goals met, and a few that still need work. The language of "Powering a Better World," the report's formal title, is remarkably direct and candid. But Page 7 of the 30-page report from the aerospace and marine engine maker might be the most remarkable of all. There, for the first time in a Rolls environment report, appears a statement of "independent assurance" from Deloitte & Touche LLP in London. Although Deloitte stresses its evaluation did not rise to the level of a formal audit or review, it does say, among other things, that the procedures Rolls-Royce used to report progress toward health, safety and environment goals "are appropriate." Why bother? To gain credibility. "We felt that it gave additional credibility to our report -- to have it independently assured in this way," explains Martin Nield, head of communications for corporate social responsibility at Rolls-Royce. "Just as with our annual report [which] one would get audited by financial auditors, for an environmental report it adds credibility to the statements we're making about improvements to our products and our operations to have our statements verified independently," he says. The idea originated last year with David Welsh, Rolls-Royce's director of health, safety and environment (HS&E). And Deloitte's work "focused on head office level S&E activities in relation to our management framework, data aggregation and reporting activities," the company discloses in the report.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.