Accountability styles in state-owned enterprises: the good, the bad, theugly ... and the pretty

Ensuring public access to the information that State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) produce is necessary andcorporate websites should be used for this purpose. However, there is a lack of research analyzing the ac-countability of SOEs. This paper aims to identify different accountability patterns among SOEs by carryingout an assessment of the e-disclosure levels of Spanish SOEs. For this purpose, a comprehensive websitecontent analysis of 91 SOEs owned by the Spanish central government was carried out. Each website wasanalyzed for 60 items classified into 4 dimensions: 1) financial information, 2) information about object-ives and strategies, 3) corporate governance and 4) usability. In order to identify different accountabilitypatterns among SOEs, cluster, multidimensional scaling and Pro-Fit analyses were carried out. Resultsshow that e-disclosure practices among Spanish SOEs are still in their infancy. Financial accountabilityis the main focus of SOEs disclosures and most are silent about their policies, objectives and corporategovernance structures. The majority of them are still anchored in a narrow accountability style that onlyconsiders shareholders as the key stakeholders and they are a long way from fulfilling the OECD recommend-ation that they should be as transparent as listed companies. Furthermore, results show that enforcementof transparency-related legislation is scarce in Spain. Based on these findings, some recommendations toimprove e-disclosure practices among SOEs are suggeste