CSRD and ESRS Double Materiality Interview Question Bank

Structure interviews around the ESRS materiality assessment purpose: understand the undertaking's context, identify actual and potential impacts, risks and opportunities, assess materiality, and prepare disclosures about the process and outcome.

Each answer should identify the business activity, geography, value-chain location, affected stakeholder or user group, evidence source, uncertainty, and proposed follow-up. Treat unsupported assertions as leads to investigate, not as final materiality conclusions.

Use these questions before scoring. ESRS materiality work needs the undertaking's own operations and upstream and downstream value chain, but it does not require equal depth for every actor. The interview should identify where material IROs are likely to arise.

Ask for concrete examples, documents, systems, contracts, complaints, incident data, supplier information, customer-use information, and external evidence that can be tested after the interview.

Impact materiality interviews should find actual and potential impacts on people or the environment. For negative impacts, ask for facts that help assess severity; for potential negative impacts, also ask about likelihood and time horizon.

Stakeholder input is useful because affected stakeholders can explain how they are or could be affected. The interview record should distinguish what the stakeholder experienced, what the undertaking inferred, and what still needs corroboration.

In these questions, scale means how grave a negative impact is or how beneficial a positive impact is. Scope means how widespread it is, such as the number of people affected or the geographical extent of environmental damage. Irremediable character means whether, and to what extent, affected people or the environment can be restored to their prior state.

Financial materiality interviews should test how sustainability matters may affect the undertaking, including through dependencies, transition effects, physical effects, regulation, market access, customers, suppliers, financing, insurance, and cost of capital.

The strongest answers connect a sustainability matter to a risk or opportunity, then to likelihood, potential magnitude, time horizon, affected financial line or business driver, and the evidence used by management.

Interview outputs should be usable by the people preparing ESRS 2 IRO-1 (the assessment process), IRO-2 (the disclosures covered in the statement), and SBM-3 (material impacts, risks and opportunities and their interaction with strategy and the business model) and by reviewers who need to understand how judgement was exercised. The ESRS do not prescribe a single interview file format, but the assessment needs enough supportable evidence to explain the process and outcome.

Keep the question bank focused on the claim being tested. A broad interview summary is weaker than a record that links each materiality conclusion to source evidence, threshold logic, opposing evidence, data limitations, and next action.

Weak double materiality interviews often generate opinions without evidence. Replace generic rating questions with prompts that identify the specific IRO, affected people or environmental receptor, value-chain location, financial pathway, threshold, and evidence.

Do not present EFRAG implementation guidance as binding law. Use it as non-authoritative support for applying the binding ESRS text, and keep the final materiality judgement tied to the undertaking's facts and circumstances.