Putting people at the heart of sustainability: interview with Simon Rawson – Executive Director, The Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures

In an exclusive interview with Forvis Mazars, Simon Rawson, Executive Director, The Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD) discusses the work, objectives and approach of the taskforce. Simon explains how the taskforce is about creating a knowledge base, evidence and recommendations on a social-related disclosure framework that could be used for businesses to report on their impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities related to people. Simon discusses how the work will build on the frameworks and approaches developed by the TCFD and TNFD but in TISFD’s case in the context of people. This is so the taskforce’s disclosure framework can work alongside the TCFD and TNFD outputs.

Start of TISFD transcript:

Thank you, Simon for taking the time to join me, I am sure that have readers who have not heard of TISFD[1], could you provide an overview of what TISFD is and its objectives/vision?

The taskforce aims to address systemic risks of inequality to our economy, to our financial system and to our society.

Your readers will be familiar with the sort of statistics which have developed over recent years about the disparity in wealth distribution; I think it is top 10% of earners receive more than half of total global pay, and the lowest half less than 10%. That is wealth inequality.

Half of the least developed countries in the world have not recovered post pandemic, according to the UN Human Development Index. You can look at almost any set of the population and almost any issue and you can find evidence of extreme and increasing inequalities. One in four young people not in education, employment or training–young women, twice as likely to be affected as young men. This is eroding cohesion and stability in society. It is undermining trust in institutions, critically hampering productivity, creating a drag on the economy and driving financial instability.

So TISFD’s (hereafter referred to as the taskforce) mission is:

1. To understand the drivers of increasing inequality within our economy and our financial system and develop evidence to understand the pathways of those drivers; and
2. armed with that information market actors (preparers of reporting and providers of capital) can take action to address systemic inequality and build an economy and financial system that is more resilient, more sustainable, and more socially sustainable.

The taskforce is modelled on the work that has been done by the Taskforce for Climate Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and the Taskforce for Nature related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). I am sure we will come back to that later.

TISFD is all about creating a knowledge base, evidence and recommendations on a framework that could be used for businesses to report on their impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities (IDROs) related to people.

I see IDROs mentioned a lot in the taskforce’s early publications – could you say a bit more about these?

If anybody is familiar with the TNFD they have a similar concept. In our context IDROs is about businesses impacts and dependencies on people; people being the centre of this framework that we are interested in. People are workers. Businesses are dependent on workers. Businesses are also dependent on consumers. They are also dependent upon the skills in the workforce.

We are also interested in businesses impacts on people regarding the quality of work that businesses provide; the quality of work being a combination of pay, the type of employment, the employment conditions, stability, security of contracts and so on.

Risks and opportunities are the positive and negative possibilities, depending on how inequality impacts on businesses. I have argued that ever increasing inequality is bad for productivity and that reducing inequality would be positive for the economy.

So I see an opportunity for businesses if they act to reduce inequalities.

What are the taskforce’s intended outputs and within what sort of timeframe are you looking to consult on/deliver them?

In this system of corporate reporting and corporate sustainability, it is important to say we are not a standard setter. We are not going to be writing disclosure standards. We do not have a mandate to do that. What we can do, however, is we can research the evidence that exists around socially-related disclosures. We can debate it. We can try to reach consensus amongst the stakeholders that are involved in the taskforce and make recommendations about what are meaningful socially-related disclosures that businesses could make. These disclosures would enable providers of capital and other stakeholders to understand what impacts businesses are having on people and what the risks and opportunities are.

Anyone who is familiar with TCFD and TNFD will be familiar with the four pillars that make up those disclosure frameworks and that contain a set of core recommended disclosures.

The heart of TISFD’s work is to create recommendations on a socially-related disclosure framework, which we hope might be adopted by standard setting bodies, whether they be international standard sectors, whether they be stock exchanges, whether they be national governments and regulators, or whether they be market actors that recognise the systemic importance of this issue and addressing it.

Alongside that framework, and in order for it to stand up to rigour, we need a strong evidence base. We need guidance and research on topics like metrics and indicators.

We also need to have capacity building materials (e.g. education materials). These will empower and enable businesses to report socially-related disclosures, and users of these disclosures to digest and understand them.

We think it is going to take us a good three years to get to that point with all these documents and the final framework recommendations.

However, key to the way that the taskforce wants to work is that it wants to be co-creative and co-productive in an inclusive process. This means that if you’re building a framework which is about impacts on people, you better put people in the process. So our governance at all levels is comprised in equal parts of representatives from businesses, finance, labour organisations and civil society organisations.

It is really important to us that there is this co-productive process over the next three years and that we consult as widely as possible geographically. This is because many of the issues that we are talking about are very different from region to region. So we aim to approach our outputs in a similar way to the way the TNFD has worked (a public iterative process), which has been really well received by those that have been involved in the TNFD process.

This way of working means that the first beta version of the framework will be published early in 2026. It will have placeholders and be illustrative in parts. For example, I do not think it contain much detail on metrics and indicators at that point. Nevertheless, the beta version will be a product that people can react to and engage with and we hope lead to an iterative public consultation process.

So, stepping back for a minute, the framework itself will hopefully emerge at the start of 2026 (in beta form) and then be developed over the following roughly 18 months.

It is also important to mention that the work that has got the taskforce to this place has been going on for nearly five years. A group of about 30 organisations–investors, businesses, civil society and labour organisations–have been working together behind the scenes to put together plans for the governance, the deliverables and some of the fundamental concepts underpinning how the framework would be positioned. It is a credit to those organisations (we call them our founding partners). They have done a tremendous job in getting this work to where it is today and handing it over to the taskforce (which was launched publicly at the end of 2024).

Readers should be aware that we have already published two documents which are intended as inputs into the taskforce’s work. The first is a short document called People in Scope. It sets out some of the very high-level fundamental concepts regarding: i) people being are at the heart of the framework; ii) businesses impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities related to people; and iii) the inequalities that we will tackle; and iv) our approach to materiality.

The second publication (published in March 2025) is our Proposed Technical Scope. It expands on the first document and goes into more depth on the likely constructs that the framework will use.

You touched on the taskforce’s governance structure, could you say more about the roles of the different Committees/Partners/Groups so readers can understand how they can get involved?

The taskforce is chaired by four Co chairs who are global leaders in their respective domains. They are ambassadors for the taskforce and oversee the sort of integrity due process so that the taskforce is true to its principles of being co-creative and putting people at the heart of its scope. The four are:

• Peter Bakker, former chief executive of TNT and now Chief executive of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
• Sharan Burrow, who is a renowned leader in the trade union movement, formerly the General Secretary of the International Trade Union Congress.
• Arunma Oteh, who is a leader in public finance and former Treasurer and a Vice President of the World Bank.
• Gabriella Ramos, who is formerly a senior leader in the OECD and now Assistant Director-General in UNESCO.

Then we have the Steering Committee. This is made-up of 21 leaders from the four constituencies I mentioned earlier (business, finance, labour organisations and civil society). We also ensure we have good, broad geographic coverage so we have representation from the Global North, the Global South and all continents are represented. The Steering Committee ultimately oversee the taskforce’s work, which will be led by a Technical Team in the TISFD Secretariat. The technical team will be drafting the various work products with the support of technical working groups, which will be set-up for a period of between four to six months.

The working groups (which we are forming at the moment) will develop the framework, the conceptual foundations, the metrics and indicators. Each working group will comprise about 15 or 20 senior practitioners and like for the Steering Committee will have broad representation across the four constituencies as well as wide geographical coverage.

The working groups and the Secretariat are the engine of where the work gets started. Stakeholder inclusion is really important to the way that the taskforce works, so we will also have wider stakeholder consultation that has global reach. We are building Regional Councils drawn from the different stakeholder groups that are based in specific geographic locations. This will ensure that our material reflects the reality of those regions.

At a broader, higher level, we are also building a Global Alliance. This is a looser, but much bigger grouping, that we hope will number hundreds of businesses, financial institutions, labour organisations, and civil society groups who want to demonstrate support for TISFD’s mission and who will engage with us and give us feedback on our materials. Of course we will be doing public consultations, but we hope that our Alliance Members will be those that who give us helpful early feedback on our work. We hope that readers will consider joining the Alliance.

The final group of stakeholders is in recognition that we are a newcomer to an already very busy space of corporate reporting and sustainability disclosures. We have set up a network of Knowledge Partners; these are institutions who are already dealing with disclosure standards in some capacity. They might be other taskforces like the TNFD, they might be standard setters like GRI or ISSB or they might be market service providers like accounting firms or ratings agencies. We want to learn from these organisations so that the work that we do is shaped by their reality and is meaningful and practical. We also want to ensure that what we do is interoperable with what other organisations are doing.

For example, one of the things we heard when we consulted with the founding partners was a real desire to examine how the taskforce’s work can connect with the debates on climate and nature. Preparers of corporate reports are finding that as they move their organisation along their transition and report on their climate and Nature transition plans, that people are the missing piece of the puzzle. You cannot transition successfully if you have not thought about the social impacts. I hope that the taskforce can contribute some knowledge to that discussion.

I am picking up that the taskforce has a lot of connections with work that has already been done by TCFD and TNFD. Could you just say more about this?

The TCFD’s work exists within the ISSB and the TNFD’s work is still ongoing. We have benefited hugely from them sharing with us what went well and what they might have done differently. For example, the TNFD were the first to pilot their framework in a very early beta format and then iterating it publicly. We hope to do the same.

They TNFD were the first that I know of to use the IDROs concepts (in their case in relation to nature). We are likely to take that idea as well. Equally, the TNFD built off the TCFD and adopted the four pillars approach to disclosure and I think we are likely to do the same.

We understand market actors need to have a reference point and be able to recognise what we are doing; so, if we are able to build frameworks which look and feel similar to those that already exist, we stand a better chance of success. It is also the case that when we spoke to stakeholders about what they want from the taskforce one of the key messages was to work on the interface between climate and nature and show us how this all joins up so we have a framework that can work alongside the TCFD and TNFD.

It is also worth noting that the ISSB is now exploring what they are calling human capital disclosures. We want to inform standard setters through providing evidence and best practice, whether that be on metrics and indicators, or anything else to help support the ISSB’s human capital work.

A big task that we are doing right now is mapping all of the different socially-related disclosure requirements, metrics and indicators that exist currently globally. So we are absolutely not starting from scratch. I really hope that we will also be true to the idea of consolidating knowledge and refining knowledge, and not creating something that is completely new.

Are there areas where the taskforce may go even further than the TCFD and TNFD and/or where social-related issues create additional complexities compared to climate and nature?

The IFRS has a longstanding definition of materiality that people might describe as founded on the concept of material risks to and opportunities for the company (that is, financial materiality).

The TNFD has gone further in its framework to look at both at financial materiality and material impacts businesses have on nature (so called double materiality). In the case of the TISFD this would be the impacts organisations have on people. Those impact disclosure standards have a home in GRI and some global reporting standards like the EU ESRS.

Where the TISFD may be different is that for us there is a third lens to materiality; businesses impacts on people that create system-level risks. You could describe this as the cumulative impacts of individual businesses on economic systems. For example, low pay might be highly advantageous to an individual business (at least in the short-term); the collective impacts of low pay might accumulate in inequality that potentially causes system-level risks to those businesses and investors in those businesses. We think it is empirically evident and what we hope to do is put some conceptual rigour and evidence behind this thinking. We believe that diversified investors have a strong interest in understanding these system-level risks because they can have impact on their investment portfolios.

I know people will think you said you want to simplify things and consolidate things and here you are introducing another risk concept. It is up to the taskforce to explain this system-level risk clearly and evidence it to illustrate how it is driving risks to countries, societies and businesses’ financial prospects.

Social dimensions are more complex than nature or climate because you have three “languages” within the social domain. One is human rights, one is human capital, and then another is this newer concept, the one that economists are really coalescing around; well-being. We believe these three different “languages” are three different lenses or aspects of the same thing, which is ultimately people’s state of being. The collective term of people’s state of being is our sort of placeholder term to encapsulate the three social dimensions. When you think what this is really about, it is people’s ability to lead good lives.

We are determined that the framework that we develop will speak equally to human rights, human capital and well-being and show how they relate to each other. For example, human rights provide some thresholds below which you should never go in relation to issues of job quality (for example, labour rights). At the same time good jobs are building human capital. They are also contributing to individual well-being. So showing how these three different social concepts interrelate and support each other is almost one of our first challenges to articulate clearly.

Given the current global political context and changing political appetite for sustainability-related disclosure, some might say this is a courageous time to be tackling socially-related topics.

I would argue that this is the very moment when we need to tackle them because the polarisation that we are seeing in the world and the turbulence it is creating, is at least, in part, driven by extreme inequalities that have grown over arguably the last 40 years. If we do not have an honest and inclusive conversation about how financial and economic systems are potentially contributing to inequality then we are missing a huge part of the potential solution, which I believe is in the interests of business; namely, to have a more stable society that is conducive to growth and success.

Given this polarised environment, we have to be extremely considered about how we describe what we are doing and how we go about our work. The broad representation and inclusive governance and consultation mechanisms that we have set up alongside our approach of evidence-based consensus building will enable us to develop a framework that can be part of the solution to the challenges we all currently face.

Our newsletter has a very wide readership, how can individuals and organisations get involved with the taskforce’s work?

The TISFD website is a good place to start as well as following us on LinkedIn.

The main way to get involved right now is to join our Alliance. It is a very low commitment. You are saying that you support our mission and we will keep you up to date with the taskforce’s work.

There is an Alliance webinar happening in late April which will provide Alliance members with key updates and gather their insights on the future direction of the taskforce. Also, in time, look out for the publications which we will be consulting on publicly and provide your comments.

I do hope as well that over the next three years, we reach a point where there are some companies who want to become early adopters of our beta framework and testing it and see how it feels.

By the time this article is published, we will have appointed people to our Regional Councils and our first Technical Working Group. But we are open to the idea that that we might add people to these bodies over time.

[1] In the interests of transparency, Forvis Mazars is a Knowledge Partner of TISFD.