Reporting on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has broadened widely within the last decade. A great deal of research on sustainability reporting (SR) has focused on American and Western Europe companies. Only fragmentary studies exist that compare reporting patterns of CEE countries. There is substantial room for investigating how and to what extend companies in CEE disclose sustainability information. This study examined the reporting behaviour of the 50 largest companies in nine CEE countries and two WE countries in order to investigate the practice and divergence of sustainability reporting in CEE countries.

The importance of corporate sustainability reporting continues to grow. This growth is rooted in numerous contingent factors and scientific questions regarding the key contingent variables arise. Knowledge related to these issues is important both for academic and practical purposes. Although sustainability reporting and sustainability management are not identical activities, they are strongly interconnected and communication, per se, is of great importance for the sustainability of companies. In the Czech Republic, and especially in the Slovak Republic, there is a lack of up-to-date empirical research into the extent of sustainability reporting and our article addresses this research gap. The primary concern is the investigation of the association between the amount and structure of disclosure and its determinants. Scientific methods of content analysis, ratio analysis, and statistical data analysis including regression analysis are applied. Few companies report on environmental and social issues in a comprehensive way. The structure and amount of reporting is similar in the countries analyzed. Company size positively impacts the relative share of both environmental and social disclosure in the total disclosure. Company affiliation to a high-profile industry positively impacts the relative share of environmental disclosure in the total disclosure, as well as the total amount of environmental disclosure. Total amount of disclosure positively impacts the absolute amount of economic, environmental and social disclosure. Reporting, in accordance with the IFRS, positively impacts the relative share of social disclosure in the total disclosure.

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Assessing the business performance is an important aspect of almost all economic decisions at the microeconomic and macroeconomic level, in the short and long term. Information about the partners' relationship to the business, their interest in the evaluation of investments can be explained by various indicators. It is relevant to understand the dependencies of the business performance and the amount of equity, while negative equity can be considered as critical information of existence. The purpose of quantitative research is to identify the relationship between reported negative equity and the business performance in Slovakia on an exhaustive sample of financial data of businesses with negative equity in the period 2014–2018. The business performance with negative equity is assessed through the Altman Z-score and the IN05 index, by classifying businesses into bankruptcy, prosperity and gray zones. Pearson's correlation analysis between negative equity and Altman Z-score performance confirms the strong direct relationship between negative equity and the bankruptcy zone, the weaker indirect relationship between negative equity and the gray zone, and almost no dependence of negative equity and prosperity zone. In the case of the IN05 index, a low correlation was found between negative equity and all three zones. Although businesses with negative equity are in a bankruptcy zone, they do not have to close automatically, but they have to improve resource management, in particular to increase equity, for example by making a profit and good financial management.

The decrease of the business property can cause a reduction in the production ability of the enterprise to the extent causing an involuntary closing of business activities. It is usually caused not only by the reported loss, but also by the greater distribution of profits, as is the amount of the real level of the enterprise's distributable profit. A thorough analysis of the reported accounting profit described in this paper should be the starting point for the allocation of profit. It is important to be able to identify and assign a portion of the accounting profit, corresponding to the non-realised profit and fictitious profit, where eventual release outside the enterprise threatens the future performance of the enterprise. These portions of the reported profit do not correspond to the actually made, realised and real production, which is a necessary condition to achieve a real profit to possible safety division to investors.