Access to EU company data: the good, the bad & the ugly
Just how much does access to company data vary across EU member states?
The last report on access to company data in the EU was published by OpenCorporates in 2012, when the average score was 23 out of 100. Since then there have been some significant changes, both in the EU, and globally. A year after that report, the EU published its open data strategy, and there have been numerous directives and reports addressing company data.
Yet despite this, our new report ‘EU Company Data: State of the Union 2020’ shows the average has increased to just 40 out of 100 (jurisdictions score a minimum of 70 points for publishing a dataset of basic company information under an open licence).
The new Open Data & PSI Directive should, however, change this massively, ensuring all jurisdictions publish company information, including ownership, as open data by July 2021. Providing this happens in full, it would mean the average score will likely be over 90 out of 100, which would truly be world-leading. However, we understand there has been considerable pushback from some countries, attempting to reduce the effective scope of the directive, or delay it (see below), and so this transformation is by no means certain.
What good looks like
In this year’s report, no EU country scores 100 points, nor even 90 out of 100. The two highest scoring countries were until recently the UK (which scored 90) and Denmark (which also previously scored 90), but Denmark no longer makes available a bulk dataset downloadable under an explicitly open licence, reducing its score. It does have a free API, with all categories of data available, potentially scoring 100, but the licence, while largely permissive does not qualify as an open licence, and signing up for an API is not an automatic process.
The UK is no longer part of the EU, and thus is not explicitly included in the report, but it does remain a benchmark for what good looks like. This is not just because of the fact that it makes all its data available for free as data, including directors, beneficial owners, filings and accounts documents. On top of this it proactively encourages reuse of its data and backs this up with an active forum for developers, on which Companies House staff answer user questions, announce new features and data, and are receptive to any data quality issues that are raised.
There is also the opportunity for ordinary members of the public to report data quality problems on the Companies House website, which together with active use of their data by tens of thousands of users, provides a powerful data-quality feedback loop.
Finally, there is regular engagement with key stakeholders such as transparency NGOs, and reuse of its data is considered to be a core KPI. Together this has transformed use of the company register data, increasing usage massively, by over 20 times in the past four years. It’s worth noting that this transparency hasn’t reduced incorporations, which were over 600,000 in 2019.
What bad looks like
Spain and Italy are two of the largest economies in the EU, and thus are standouts among the member states for their poor scores. Neither makes any data available as open data, and both charge for even the most basic data records on their web portals. Rather than prioritising transparency of company information, they appear to see their key role as revenue generation through restricting access to it.
Special mention in this section should go to the Kamer van Koophandel (KvK) — the Netherlands register. This is an important register not just for the Netherlands but the whole of Europe, as it is one of the largest registers in Europe, with a far greater number of companies per capita than, say, Germany, perhaps due to its use by large corporations in tax planning.
What distinguishes the KvK is that it actively appears to be against open data, and appears to be working to counteract moves towards openness. For example, just over a year before it is due to make the company register and company ownership available as open data via the Open Data and PSI Directive, it is claiming database rights on the register, and is proposing using these to prevent other users from storing copies of the data, or making the data available to third parties.
This is entirely in contradiction to the Directive, which states, “the high-value datasets [including company register] should be made available for re-use with minimal legal restrictions and free of charge”. Whether the company register would be considered by courts to be able to have database rights is open to question, and it would have serious societal implications if it did. But the directive states further that such rights must not be used to “prevent re-use or to restrict the re-use of existing documents beyond the limits provided for in this Directive”.
Another question is whether the KvK — a private entity — should be allowed to set the agenda like this. Unfortunately, the organisation is largely opaque, with accounts which list only gross figures for income and expenditure, and no explanation of how it spends its budget, which is twice the size of UK Companies House, despite having fewer than half the number of companies in the register.
How does this compare with other countries?
The EU’s average score of 40 is by no means the worst in the world — the average for the US is 31/100 (in the US, companies are incorporated at the state level). However, unlike the EU, the US has no states that score 0 out of 100 (the EU has two: Spain and Austria, and one with just 10/100: Italy). Since the UK left the EU, the average score has dropped, but only by a little — as while the UK scores 90/100, its departure also saw the departure of Gibraltar, which scored 0/100.
A tale of two states: Sweden vs Denmark
The uneven nature of access to official company register data in the EU can be seen in two countries right next to each other: Denmark and Sweden. Denmark scores a respectable 75 out of 100 — not the best in the EU but light years ahead of Sweden. All of the register is available for free, and there is a free API that allows all the data, including shareholders and accounts, to be downloaded for free as structured data.
Sweden on the other hand currently publishes no open data on companies, and in fact even restricts all but the name, company identifier and status to paying users of the website. As such, it scores a very poor 25 out of 100–20 for making that basic data available for free, and 5 for terms of use that may not restrict usage but nevertheless don’t provide the legal certainty of an open licence.
Want to learn more? Read the full report:
‘EU Company Data: State of the Union 2020’
Interested in the US perspective? Read our recent report:
‘US Company Data: State of the Nation 2020’
