Studie von Transparency International zur Transparenz der 124 größten multinationalen Unternehmen, 5.11. 2014 (engl. Originalfassung)
INTRODUCTION
The combined market value of the world’s largest publicly traded companies exceeds US$14 trillion, a staggering number that dwarfs the GDP of most countries. These powerful companies exert huge economic and political influence. Yet we continue to know too little about them.
This Transparency International report, Transparency in Corporate Reporting: Assessing the World’s Largest Companies, evaluates the transparency of corporate reporting by the world’s 124 largest publicly listed companies. The report assesses the disclosure practices of companies with respect to their anti-corruption programmes, company holdings and the disclosure of key financial information on a country-by-country basis. It follows on from a 2012 report which focused on the world’s 105 largest publicly traded companies. The report is part of a series of studies based on a similar methodology aimed at assessing the transparency practices of companies, the most recent being a 2013 report on leading emerging market companies.
Global companies have legal and ethical obligations to conduct their business honestly. This requires commitment, resources and the ongoing management of a range of risks – legal, political and reputational – including those associated with corruption. The implementation of a comprehensive range of anti-corruption policies and management systems is fundamental to efforts to prevent and remediate corruption within organisations.
Transparency International believes that public reporting by companies on their anti-corruption programmes allows for increased monitoring by stakeholders and the public at large, thereby making companies more accountable. Global companies themselves increasingly understand the benefits of corporate reporting on a range of corporate responsibility issues, including their anti-corruption programmes, as an essential management tool rather than a burdensome and costly exercise that is carried out to satisfy stakeholders. The use of voluntary sustainability reporting guidelines such as those provided by the Global Reporting Initiative is on the rise. According to a 2013 survey by KPMG, close to 80 per cent of the largest 100 companies in 41 countries worldwide issuing corporate responsibility reports now use the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability Reporting Guidelines. The report notes as well that an impressive 93 per cent of the world’s largest 250 companies issue a corporate responsibility report. The introduction in recent years of corporate reporting regulation in Denmark, France and South Africa has also acted as a major driver for company reporting in those countries.
As many of the recent corporate scandals have shown, acts of corruption are very often aided by the use of opaque company structures and secrecy jurisdictions. But the use of offshore companies and their lack of transparency are posing increasing risks for global companies as well as for their shareholders, employees and local communities.
Momentum around these issues is growing. The G8 and G20 countries have committed to undertake reforms aimed at enhancing transparency and preventing the misuse of legal entities, and are being called upon to require mandatory public disclosure of the ultimate owners of companies.
Companies can mitigate the risks posed by lack of transparency and ownership arrangements by shedding more light on their corporate structures and by making basic financial information public on a country-by-country basis. This allows stakeholders to have a clearer understanding of the extent of a company’s operations and makes the company more accountable for its activities in a given country, including assessing whether it contributes financially in a manner appropriate to its level of activity.
Transparency International believes that comprehensive public reporting is a key component of the measures companies must take to address corruption and provide the transparency that is the basis for robust and accountable governance.
Since Transparency International began assessing the transparency practices of companies in 2008, with a report focusing on major companies in the oil and gas
sector, there has been considerable movement in the transparency requirements of companies, both voluntary and mandatory. These include the United States 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which will require country-level reporting of all payments to governments by extractive companies registered on US stock exchanges, and similar rules recently adopted for European companies in the oil, gas, mining and logging industries. Although it is promising, the new legislation has had little impact yet as the rules that apply to companies registered on the US stock exchange have not come into effect as a result of a legal challenge. EU member state legislation enacting the EU directive is not expected to be in place until 2015.
Nevertheless, the issue of country-by-country reporting is gathering steam. The EU and US laws created a new mandatory global transparency standard for the extractive industries. According to Publish What You Pay, a global network of civil society organisations calling for an open and accountable extractive sector, “these cover 65 per cent of the value of the global extractives market, including most international oil, gas and mining majors, as well as Chinese, Russian, Brazilian and other state-owned companies […].” In June 2013, Canada announced it would establish new mandatory reporting standards for Canadian extractive companies.
Furthermore, the OECD, mandated by the Group of 20, has developed a standard for country-by-country reporting by multinationals companies in all sectors which is expected to be endorsed by the G20 Summit in November 2014 and subsequently included in national legislation.
In the financial sector, new reporting requirements have been put in place that will mandate EU credit institutions and investment firms to report on profits made, taxes paid and subsidies received for each financial year as well as the geographic location.
In spite of these advances, most companies continue to reveal too little about their management systems to prevent and detect corruption. Some progress is being registered among global companies in the disclosure of anti-corruption programmes. Their corporate holdings, however, are difficult to track and the disclosure of information on key financial payments to governments on a country-by-country basis remains the practice of only very few companies. This means that, for the most part, large public companies are not doing enough to foster the transparency and accountability that are needed to ward off corruption.
Although public reporting by companies on their anti-corruption programmes cannot be equated with actual performance, reporting does focus the attention of companies on their practices and drives improvement. Through engagement with companies in the course of compiling the Transparency in Corporate Reporting studies, we have observed that several companies have improved the quality and extent of their anti-corruption measures as well as how they publicly report on these.
Beyond our own observations, empirical evidence is emerging that reporting by responsible companies does reflect the measures they actually have in place within their companies. Indeed, a recent Harvard Business School study concluded that “on average, firms’ elf-reported anticorruption efforts reflect real efforts to combat corruption and are not merely cheap talk.”
Country-by-country reporting provides a basic level of transparency needed for companies to be held accountable for their activities in a particular country. Disclosing key financial data enables citizens to evaluate whether the company is contributing in a manner appropriate to its level of activity and, in some instances, to provide entry points to identify potential cases of corruption.
Furthermore, in light of the current debate on the practices of multinationals that shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions, it is increasingly recognised that country-by-country reporting of payments to governments would not only make global companies more transparent but could also provide a path to tackle tax avoidance.
As companies struggle to re-build public trust in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, integrity must be central to these efforts. Those efforts, in turn, can only become fully credible if they are undertaken with a sustained commitment to ethical behaviour and transparency across companies’ operations.
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