Taking the first steps towards designing a global and open register of beneficial ownership at IODC

Who really controls the companies registered in Panama, the Bahamas, and Delaware? Investigating corporate networks is not easy.

Imagine you wanted to see if the local company in Nigeria was connected to a multi-national extractives giant like Shell or Eni. Currently, you would go to the corporate register if it is open. If it’s not (and chances are it probably isn’t), you would buy the corporate filings. You would take the information in it, and compare it with the annual report on the company’s website. You would fill the other gaps by turning to search engines and seeing what the internet throws up, and hope to goodness it’s reliable. This may seem simple but it is not.

The steps so far have assumed many things. For one, we assume that the corporate register is open. The Open Data Barometer report by Web Foundation found only 1% of corporate registers are open. Then comes the buying of corporate filings. If you do decide to purchase the filings, the chances are that they may not contain the information you need, or are illegible, bad quality scans of paper documents. And so it goes.

Often, even when you do have access to filings and annual reports, making the link between individuals and corporations, corporations to corporations, can be extremely complex. Given that corrupt politicians and business people routinely use corporations to avoid taxes, launder money from criminal activities, and enrich themselves and their families through public contracts it seems imperative to have access to granular, open data about the ownership and control chains.

So what is being done to tackle this lack of data?

The answer is: a lot more than was being done last year. There has been a global movement of civil society and businesses who have been working together to push governments for greater transparency and it has achieved some success. The UK has already started collecting and publishing beneficial ownership data. Norway, South Africa, Nigeria, Denmark, Afghanistan, France are amongst others have pledged to do the same. This is a good first step but more needs to be done if we are going to surface connections and flag corruption risks. All of these datasets would be siloed and the quality of data would differ for each jurisdiction. To make this data searchable and comparable across multiple jurisdictions, we would need a global open register of beneficial ownership. A single window to search, combine and link the incoming global data sets.

This is what the partners behind the Global Beneficial Ownership Register have set out to do this year but we’re going a step further. We want to enable progressive companies who want to self-report their corporate structure to do so through the register. Countries will also be able to use the infrastructure of the register, and the open data standards that it will develop to help collect such information and link to other databases such as public contracts through the Open Contracting Data Standard, reducing the barriers to doing so.

But the creation of such a register cannot and should not be done in isolation. We need procurement officers, businesses, due diligence experts, civil society, investigative journalists, lawyer, accountants and others to help us design the register.

This is why we’re hosting a design workshop at the Open Standards Day on Wednesday, 5th October. If you have experienced any of the pain points above, here is your chance to help us create a solution.

If you can’t make it, you can still join our voluntary network of testers to help us iterate the register virtually.