The simplified ESRS adopted by the Commission on 3 July 2026 are available at the same address where the May consultation on the draft was run. At the bottom of the page there is a "Commission adoption" section, from which you can download the text of the delegated regulation and the annex containing the standards, in English as well as in Polish and other languages. We are currently in the so-called scrutiny period, during which both the Parliament and the Council may reject the regulation introducing the standards. This period lasts two months but may be extended. It should therefore end in September or, if extended, in November. The regulation will then be published in the Official Journal of the EU and will enter into force. The most important point is that no further changes can now be made to the text of the standards. If you are preparing to report for 2026 using the simplified ESRS, this is at last their final version.
Meanwhile, another set of ESRS has appeared on the horizon. Under the Omnibus, the Commission, the Parliament and the Council decided to help the competitors of European companies and exempt around 90% of them from reporting obligations, yet some 1,000 groups headquartered outside the EU, with sufficiently large sales within the Union, will still be required to disclose on sustainability. More precisely, the obligation will fall on their sufficiently large subsidiaries and branches located in Member States. They will have to prepare reports in accordance with standards provisionally named ESRS-40a (after the number of the article in the directive that introduces this obligation). The draft of these standards was previously called "non-EU ESRS", but apparently that name was considered negative and stigmatising, so it was changed 😉
The draft ESRS-40a standards you will find on the EFRAG page dedicated to the consultation, which runs until 31 October 2026. The standards were created in a fairly simple way: the simplified ESRS (the ones issued by the Commission in early July) served as the basis, and everything relating to impact materiality was retained while everything relating to financial materiality (risks and opportunities) was removed.
It is worth paying attention, however, to paragraph 28 proposed in ESRS-40a 1 and to the accompanying paragraphs 29–30. In principle, the report is to cover the entire group, i.e. the same scope as the consolidated financial statements (paragraph 27). But under paragraph 28, a group may limit itself to reporting only so-called "EU-related impacts". What are those? They are impacts connected with activities carried out within the European Union (simple and easy to determine), as well as impacts connected with products and services that are sold or provided, or can reasonably be expected to be sold or provided, on the EU market, not only directly but through various sales and distribution networks.
I'll give a horse and cart to anyone who, in a factory on the other side of the world humming along on three shifts, is able to identify which specific health-and-safety or pollution impacts should be attributed to the batch of products that ultimately ends up in one of the EU Member States, and which relate to products sold outside the Union. Or what will stop a company from claiming that the products made during the day by legally employed adult workers on an assembly line powered by green energy go to the EU, while everything produced by people paid inadequate wages, in appalling health-and-safety conditions, from components containing who-knows-what contaminants, is sold outside the Union. And which auditor will be able to challenge such a claim?
Paragraph 28 of ESRS-40a 1 is a gift to the competitors of European companies, who will be able to use it to avoid disclosing facts that are inconvenient for them. That is why, during the Sustainability Reporting TEG deliberations, I voted against the entire ESRS-40a set, because this single paragraph turns the whole concept of reliable reporting on its head. I hope it will be removed from the draft in the course of further work. If you care about improving the competitive position of European companies, I encourage you to take part in the consultation and to voice your opposition to provisions of this kind 😊
Polish 
English