Paper on the Business Case for Transparency

CCSI strongly supports the transparency of contracts and tax flows. CCSI shares the belief of many stakeholders that transparency is essential to leverage extractive industries for sustainable development and is in the mutual interest of all stakeholders. However, some industry players continue to voice the concern that increased transparency would be harmful for their business. Therefore, CCSI is working to also establish the business case for transparency. In one such case, some industry players have been lobbying against the regulations developed by the Security and Exchange Commission to implement the mandatory disclosure provisions of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act; section 1504 of that act requires all US listed companies to report detailed payments to governments on a project-by-project basis in all countries of operation. To support the SEC’s mandate in implementing the regulations, and to respond to some of the concerns of industry, CCSI identified the publicly listed extractive industry companies that disclose tax payments on a country-by-country basis and showed the correlation of this reporting practice with both higher financial performance and fewer reported incidences of human and environmental rights violations in the communities where they operate. A paper presenting the complete findings of the analysis is available here