Financial Transparency Coalition

Last July, the Dodd-Frank act provided in its section 1504 that all companies operating in the extractive industries that must report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would have to publish all payments they make to the U.S. government or any foreign government on a project basis. Since then, the French and British governments have supported similar EU legislation. Many international companies worldwide, and not only the U.S. companies, will be covered by the upcoming SEC regulations which implement section 1504. The argument against such a provision—being a threat to competitiveness—was utilized widely even before Dodd-Frank was...

Targeting Stock Exchanges is Key in Civil Society's Push for Country-by-Country Reporting, writes François Valérian Today, Transparency International and the Revenue Watch Institute have published the Promoting Revenue Transparency 2011 Report on Oil and Gas Companies. This report evaluates corporate reporting performance on anti-corruption programmes, on subsidiaries and partners, as well as on country-level financial results and technical data. The report shows a concerning reporting gap. Most companies score significantly better in reporting on anti-corruption programmes than in country-level reporting of relevant financial and technical data. This gap further illustrates the major focus of corporate communication, at least for listed...

Seventy-Seven Years After the Pecora Commission Released It's Report on the Stock Market Crash of 1929, the U.S. Government Publishes a Familiar Document The National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States has recently published its report on the Financial Crisis. The more than 600 pages of this report are a must-read for all people concerned with the last crisis and the ways to avoid a future one. I will not pretend here that I read the entirety of the document, only the conclusions, - and I did one additional reading… The good thing...

A certain number of tools have been developed over the past two decades to enhance corporate or governmental transparency. Anticorruption prevention tools, integrity pacts, and good reporting or disclosure practices were adopted by a certain number of corporations, governments or public institutions, those being individual players in the global economy. Yet the 2008 crisis has shown that many individual commitments or right behaviors were not enough when a few uncontrolled players could put the entire system at considerable risk and threaten economic development for several years.