Availability: Beneficial ownership

To what extent is company beneficial ownership information available as structured open data?

Definitions

Definitions and Identification

A beneficial ownership register should contain details of the natural persons who have an ownership or control stake in registered companies.

There is currently significant variance with regard to beneficial ownership registers. In some cases, registers apply to all companies in a jurisdiction. In others, registers apply only to a small subset of companies, such as companies involved in the extractives industry, another regulated sector, or in receipt of public procurement contracts.

Research Guidance

Starting points

• Sources:
  • The OpenOwnership map links to a number of public registers of beneficial ownership (but is not exhaustive or always entirely up to date).
  • Global Witness reporting on EU Beneficial Ownership registers from March 2020 includes links to a number of available registers.
  • The Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative resource library contains a series of country guides (developed in 2016/17) aimed at public authorities seeking to access company and beneficial ownership information across borders; search these for 'beneficial ownership' and filter by country. These can provide context on the kinds of data collected and (as of their time of publication) made available to the public.
• Search:
  • Search the website of the national company register or registrar for mentions of beneficial ownership or related terms.
  • 'Beneficial ownership' + [country].
  • 'Ultimate beneficial owner' + [country].
  • 'Beneficiary owners' + [country].
• Consult:
  • Transparency campaigners.

What to look for?

Look for evidence that can answer the following questions:

• Are members of the public able to access beneficial ownership information, or is it only provided to certain parties (e.g., law enforcement)?
  • Note: in cases where a register exists but is not public, the best sources of information about it are likely to be announcements from industry and government about relevant anti-money laundering (AML) legislative changes.
• Does the data contains unique identifiers for each company?
• Does the data contains clear and robust identifying information for each beneficial owner? Does it include only names and address or nationality, or does it also include persistent identifiers such as birth dates or national ID numbers? Is it sex- and/or gender-differentiated?
• Does the data contains comprehensive details of the interests held by each beneficial owner? Does it include not only details about the nature of an interest—such as whether it is shares, voting rights, ownership, or control—but also its size? (E.g., 25% of the shares, or 40% of the votes.)
• Does the data cover only a limited set of companies? E.g., from a single economic sector or only those that registered or updated their records after a certain date.

National and sub-national considerations

Where company registration is a sub-national responsibility, beneficial ownership registers may also be maintained sub-nationally. In these cases, look for and assess the best case example of data availability, and use the question on the coverage ('How comprehensive is the data assessed for this question?') to indicate whether this represents common practice or not.

In cases where neither national nor sub-national governments maintain registers, but data is available for a particular sector (e.g., extractives), carry out your assessment for that sector, and use the coverage question to indicate whether this represents common practice or not.

Question sub-components

Show/hide supporting questions

Existence

• Is this data available online in any form?
  • Data is not available online.

    Supporting questions: Are there other offline ways to access this data in the country? (e.g., attending an office to inspect it).

  • Data is available, but not as a result of government action.

    Supporting questions: If government is not providing access to data, how is this data available? Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

  • Data is available from government, or because of government actions.

    Supporting questions: Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

Elements

• Data fields and quality:

• The dataset contains unique identifiers for each company. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If company information data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where company identifiers are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The dataset contains identifying information for each beneficial owner. (No, Partially, Yes) Answer 'Partially' if a dataset contains only names and address or nationality. Answer 'Yes' if a dataset includes other key identifiers as well, such as date of birth (at least month and year), national ID number, or other persistent identifier.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please list the identifying information provided.

  If Partially or Yes: If beneficial ownership data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where clear identification of owners is located.

• The dataset contains details of the interests held by each beneficial owner. (No, Partially, Yes) Answer 'Yes' if both the nature (e.g., shares, voting rights, ownership, or control) and size (e.g., 25% of the shares, or 40% of the votes) of the interest are given. Answer 'Partially' if only some of this information is given.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If beneficial ownership data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where details of interests are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data includes information about individuals' sex and/or gender. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe what data includes sex and/or gender information.

• The data is published according to one or more relevant data standards. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Which standards are in use?

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data openness, timing, and structure:

• Dataset is available free of charge. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data is openly licensed. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If No: If there are explicit restrictions placed on re-use of the dataset, briefly describe those here.

  If Partially or Yes: If the data is provided with an explicit open license, please provide the name of the license, or a link to it here.

• Data is available in all the country’s official or national languages. If the country has no official or national languages, data is available in the major languages of the country. (No, Partially, Yes) Assess this against the list of official, national, or in-use languages you provided as part of your response to the governance indicator that asks, "To what extent do relevant laws, regulations, policies, and guidance require that data collection and publication processes be available in the country’s official or national languages?"

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe the language coverage available.

• There are accessible and open official tools available to help users explore data. (No, Partially , Yes) Answer 'Partially' if tools make it possible to get at extracts of data without having to download a full dataset. Answer 'Yes' if there is an interactive tool that displays user-filtered extracts of the data to answer simple questions without downloading data at all.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide URL.

  If Partially : What are the main barriers to accessibility and usability?

• Data is timely and updated. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: When was the most recent update to this dataset?

• Historical data is available that allows users to track change over time. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

  If Partially or Yes: For what time period(s) (e.g., start and end dates) is data available?

• Data is provided in machine-readable format(s) (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where this machine-readable data can be found. (Additional URLs can be included in the justification and supporting evidence)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a comma separated list of the formats available? (E.g. csv, json)

  If Partially: What prevents you from assessing this data as fully machine-readable?

• The machine-readable dataset is available as a whole (No, Partially, Yes) Answer no if it's only possible to access individual records; Answer partially if it's possible to export extracts of the data; Answer yes if there are bulk downloads or APIs providing access to the whole dataset without financial, technical or legal barriers.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where bulk download access is available or described.

  If Partially or Yes: If bulk access is provided through an API, please provide a link to where the API is described.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Negative scoring:

• This information is missing required data. (There is no evidence of data gaps., There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing., There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.) In cases where the indicator itself identifies a dataset(s) to assess against or a separate governance indicator has asked you to determine data requirements of a relevant governing framework, assess against that. In cases where there is no such identified dataset(s) or related governance indicator, assess based on the parameters laid out in the publication of the information (e.g., are some fields entirely empty when they shouldn't be?), your local knowledge (e.g., if the data is supposed to include information for all public officials, does the number of total entries look right?), and any broader research you may have done for this theme (e.g., have media articles decried the incompleteness of the data?).

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing. or There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.: Please briefly explain.

• The availability of this data has been affected by government response to COVID-19. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe how COVID-19 affected the availability of this data.

Extent

• How comprehensive is the data assessed for this question?

  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, but there are many other localities without available data, or with data of a lesser quality.

    Supporting questions: Which locality does this data cover?

  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, and is a representative example of the kind of data that can be found for most but not all localities.

    Supporting questions: Which localities does this data cover?

  • The data assessed provides national coverage.

• Is the data restricted to a particular sector? Or does it have broad coverage of companies in the country?

  • The data covers companies from a single economic sector (e.g., extractives industry) and there is minimal beneficial ownership data available from other sectors.

    Supporting questions: Which sector does this data cover?

  • The data covers, or is representative of, the kind of data that cover, companies involved in a number of different sectors (e.g., extractives, government procurement, financial markets).

    Supporting questions: Which sectors does this data cover?

  • The data covers the majority of registered companies in the country.

    Supporting questions: Which sectors does this data cover?

Indicator Justification

Beneficial ownership data is valuable for a wide range of use cases, including:

• Supporting anti-corruption and anti–money laundering investigations;
• Enabling business intelligence and corporate due diligence;
• Supporting cross-border and wealth taxation;
• Governance of extractive industries and other high-risk sectors.

Lord (2019) describes how, over the last decade, three issues have come together to support a push for improved corporate data sharing, and in particular, better collection and sharing of data on beneficial owners: the 2008 financial crisis brought into relief the “dangers of uncertain information and unknown actors in financial markets”; a 2011 World Bank report on the abuse of anonymous companies; and international taxation and anti-money laundering reforms. These have all highlighted the need for interchangeable data not only on firms, but also on their ownership structures and the natural persons behind them.

Within the corporate information landscape, the concept of beneficial ownership has rapidly gained traction. Increasingly, countries require companies to disclose the identities of the individuals who hold ultimate ownership or control over legal entities, cutting through layers of shell corporations and other complex arrangements (Low and Kiepe 2020; Russell-Prywata 2020).

Some countries have responded to new requirements for beneficial ownership disclosure by updating existing corporate registers; others have developed parallel beneficial ownership registers or disclosure regimes (Financial Accountability Task Force/OECD 2019). Virtually all of the legal and regulatory frameworks for beneficial ownership transparency will have originated in an era in which administrations should be aware of the potential value of structured data. Consequently, tracking the extent to which these frameworks—and their related datasets—explicitly incorporate awareness of data can offer important insights into the degree to which countries are integrating a data-aware approach into new regulatory activities.

This indicator pairs with a related governance indicator to compare frameworks and actual practice.