From ERP to Regulator: ERP-Native ESG Data Infrastructure for Digital Government Accountability in Emerging Economies

Abstract

Government efforts to regulate sustainability depend on the quality, comparability, and verifiability of information flows from regulated organizations to oversight bodies. In many emerging economies, ESG reporting is still produced through spreadsheets, surveys, or stand-alone disclosure tools outside authoritative accounting systems, weakening auditability, increasing reconciliation costs, and limiting transaction-level verification. Drawing on digital government research on regulatory information infrastructures, machine-readable regulation, and data-driven regulatory delivery, this paper argues that ESG oversight is fundamentally an information-governance problem: enforceability depends on standardized semantics, controlled provenance, and interoperable reporting pipelines that support automated validation and traceable auditing. The paper develops a conceptual design synthesis integrating (i) digital government and regulatory information infrastructure scholarship, (ii) sustainability accounting and environmental management accounting (EMA), and (iii) ERP and management accounting change. It specifies an implementable Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)-to-regulator architecture and derives three analytical propositions concerning embedding depth, traceability, and scope conditions. Using SAP FI/CO as an illustrative example, the framework embeds sustainability attributes within routine accounting objects and control processes. It operationalizes this through three levers: (1) an ESG chart-of-accounts addendum, (2) carbon and energy sub-ledgers for cost-object and asset-level attribution, and (3) machine-readable ERP-to-regulator reporting (API/XBRL-style) with validation rules, access controls, provenance logging, and exception workflows. Bangladesh is used as an illustrative policy context rather than an empirical case study. The paper's contribution is a regulator-ready conceptual architecture that links ERP-based accounting infrastructure to ESG auditability and regulatory enforceability, offering a pathway to scale sustainability assurance in ERP-mature sectors without creating parallel reporting stacks.

Keywords

ERP systems ESG reporting sustainability accounting digital government regulatory information infrastructure SAP FI/CO machine-readable regulation emerging economiese

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