The European Commission presents a Competitiveness Compass, which will simplify the regulatory burden of sustainability reporting, due diligence and taxonomy

One of the targets of the Competitiveness Compass, which will guide the Commission’s work over the next five years, is to reduce the regulatory and administrative burden drastically. In this context, the Omnibus proposal, expected in February, will be designed to simplify the sustainability reporting, due diligence and taxonomy.
On January 29, 2025 the European Commission issued a communication (see press release here), addressed to the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, in which it has set out the three pillars designed to boost the EU’s competitiveness.
The tree pillars that the European Commission will focus on are moving forward on innovation, aligning the decarbonization goal with EU policies to increase competitiveness, as well as reducing excessive dependence on certain countries or suppliers, increasing resilience and security.
These pillars are complemented with five enablers to underpin competitiveness across all sectors, including lowering barriers to the Single Market, creating an efficient capital market that will help investments flow, promoting skills and quality jobs, coordinating policies at national and EU level as well as reducing and simplifying the administrative and regulatory burden drastically.
Simplification efforts will be targeted at reducing the administrative burden by at least 25% for firms and by at least 35% for small and medium-sized companies.
In line with earlier announcement made by the president of the European Commission in November 2024, it has been signaled among the measures to achieve that goal that the upcoming Omnibus proposal, expected to be available on February 26, 2025, will contain a far-reaching simplification in the sustainability reporting, due diligence and taxonomy.
With this measure the Commission seeks to ensure better alignment of the requirements with the needs of investors, proportionate timelines, financial metrics that do not discourage investments in smaller companies in transition, and obligations proportionate to the size and scale of activities of different companies. It will notably attempt to prevent smaller companies along the supply chains from being subject in practice to excessive reporting requests. As part of this aim, the Commission is preparing a simplification of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) for smaller market players.
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