Most ESG programs are built to tell a story. Auditors aren’t listening for stories—they’re looking for evidence. In this episode, we dismantle the most common misconception in sustainability reporting: that ESG is a report. It isn’t. ESG, if it’s going to survive assurance, regulation, and investor scrutiny, must behave like a system of record. This is a deep dive into what “audit-grade ESG” actually means in system terms—and how to build it on Microsoft Cloud without relying on dashboards, spreadsheets, or tribal knowledge. What You’ll Learn
- Why ESG reporting fails audit pressure
- The difference between narrative ESG and operational ESG (oESG)
- Why dashboards and spreadsheets are the fastest path to audit failure
- Deterministic vs. probabilistic ESG—and why auditors only accept one
- The four non-negotiable audit requirements
- Immutability (WORM storage, not promises)
- Reproducibility (rerun FY-1 in FY+2 and get the same result)
- End-to-end lineage (origin → transformation → report)
- Separation of duties enforced by identity, not policy slides
- The Microsoft architecture that actually survives assurance
- Entra ID as the enforcement layer for governance
- ADLS Gen2 with immutability for evidence, not convenience
- Fabric Lakehouse or Synapse as a governed calculation engine
- Microsoft Purview as the only scalable answer to “prove it”
- Power BI as presentation—not accounting
- Why dashboards are an audit liability
- How DAX-based logic silently rewrites history
- Why calculations must live outside the reporting layer
- How to design Power BI for assurance vs. management use
- The hidden failure modes that collapse ESG stacks
- Manual CSV overrides (final_v7.csv)
- Calculation drift in semantic models
- Emission factors without versioning
- “Hero admin” access and collapsed role separation
- A replicable, minimal viable auditable ESG blueprint
- Raw / Curated / Reported storage anatomy
- Controlled ingestion with append-only evidence
- Versioned factor libraries and period-bound logic
- Period close that actually locks history
- Evidence packs you can produce without rebuilding memory
Key Takeaway If your ESG number exists because someone edited a spreadsheet or tweaked a dashboard, your stack isn’t a stack—it’s a story. Auditable ESG is not about better visuals.
It’s about immutable data, versioned calculations, enforced identity, and lineage that holds up when the questions stop being polite.
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If this clashes with how you’ve seen it play out, I’m always curious.
I use LinkedIn for the back-and-forth.
