Extractive Industries Program: Tax Transparency Issues and Their Impact on Extractive Companies

Profit shifting and tax avoidance schemes carry significant legal, regulatory, and public image risks for companies and investors. It is often not easy to get a full picture based on aggregate taxes paid as shown in financial reports, even if a company reports its payments to governments (which only some businesses do comprehensively). Public country-by-country reporting would require companies to publicly list information on business activities, employees, revenues, profits, and tax on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis. Do you think this breakdown would be useful to analysts and investment managers?

The Extractive Industries Program is maintaining its focus on corporate governance with our next webinar on transparency of taxes. Oxfam and the FACT Coalition are engaging with companies in the oil & gas sector and beyond to urge them to publish a GRI-aligned tax transparency report with public country-by-country reporting (PCbCR). They have had some success with large multinational players, and engagement with EM companies and banks is also on the rise. 

Daniel Mulé from Oxfam America, Sebastien Akbik from the Principles for Responsible Investment, and John Keenan from the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition will discuss the importance of this aspect of corporate governance, share details on the evolving landscape of regulation and tax transparency disclosures, and offer some valuable investor recommendations and calls for action. 
 
Speakers:

Daniel Mulé, Policy Lead, Extractive Industries Tax and Transparency, Oxfam America
 
Sebastien Akbik, Corporate Governance Analyst, Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI)

John Keenan, Corporate Governance Analyst for Capital Strategies for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME, member of FACT Coalition)

Nadine Cavusoglu, Director of the Agriculture Program, EMIA (moderator)