27 October 2008
The International Finance Corporation's (IFC) website on extractive industries government payment disclosure has made progress, but certain gaps in data availability remain.
In August of 2008, BIC reviewed the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) disclosures of all material payments to governments displayed on its website. At that time, only six of the nine applicable projects contained activated links to data. Of the six, one provided the 2006, rather than 2007 figures. According to requirements laid out in its Policy on Social and Environmental Sustainability, the IFC is responsible for not only publishing payments but updating them regularly.
As of early October 2008, the disclosure website has seen significant improvement. Projects with inaccessible data – Vostok in Russia, Melrose in Egypt and Bulgaria and Pan American Energy in Peru – all acquired the appropriate links. Despite these positive steps, several problems with disclosure data still remain. For example, 2007 payments for the Petrotesting project in Colombia have yet to be posted, the Vostok project payments are available only in Russian and the entire disclosure website is relatively challenging to find; inconspicuously located in one of many pages of the World Bank’s Oil, Gas, Mining and Chemicals section.
There is also a significant degree of inconsistency in reporting of figures among the different projects. Limited reporting such as only of taxes and royalties, reporting of lump sum payments and lack of information availability in English, continue to pose problems for payment disclosure transparency. Lack of clarity for many of these disclosed payments has also been a continuing issue. The disclosure website also includes a list of clients who “by the nature do not directly make payments related to the extraction of natural resources” – another point that deserves more clarification. These discrepancies reflect the need for more articulation in the IFC disclosure policy. Currently, IFC’s policy does not clearly spell out how and in what format the payments are to be reported; an important omission in the drive for more transparency in the extractive industries sector.
Resources