Header image: Photo by Ricardo Rocha on Unsplash
mySociety and SpendNetwork have been working on a project for the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) Global Digital Marketplace Programme and the Prosperity Fund Global Anti-Corruption programme, led by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), around beneficial ownership in public procurement. This is one of a series of posts about that work.
While the main purpose of collecting beneficial ownership information is as part of an anti-corruption agenda, ownership information can also be used in public procurement as part of preferential procurement programmes. These are meant to increase the distribution of government contracts among different groups in a country.
South Africa is an example of a country with a system of preferential procurement through the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) programme. This programme gives preference to companies that (amongst other criteria) have more Black people and/or women in ownership and management.
This works through a certification process where auditors convert evidence of ownership and management into a certification for the company, which is then used in the procurement process. While conceptually similar to beneficial ownership in many ways, this methodology differs from the requirement of disclosure of ownership that tends to be used in beneficial ownership.
Public disclosure of ownership could be made a component of preferential procurement or similar schemes, but this would also require understanding of ownership at lower thresholds than is currently common. Understanding the demographics of ownership requires a full picture of shareholders, and that may include adding up many with small shares. The Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS), does allow for anonymous persons where a reason is given, and so information could be captured and released for demographic analysis while not disclosing the identities of owners below a threshold.
BODS does not currently cover demographic information for individuals or certification for companies. Doing so could increase its applicability to broader procurement objectives such as B-BBEE. There is discussion on OpenOwnership’s BODS repository of what the inclusion of additional personal data fields would involve. In general BODS approaches field inclusion using the principle of data minimisation, where the data collected should be the smallest amount of personal information required to fulfil a valid purpose. There is an intentional decision to exclude gender information from the global standard/data store, with the argument that personal information included in the overall standard should be demonstrably useful for the purposes of disambiguation. This is seen as the main purpose of ownership information on a global scale, rather than demographic analysis.
Rather than inclusion in the global standard, localised extensions are seen as more appropriate for demographic information, as what is of interest will vary from place to place. While a gender field could be relatively universal, understandings of ethnicity are often culturally specific and a universal standard would be inappropriate. For instance, Australia’s Indigenous Procurement Policy (IPP) recommends the use of an Indigenous business register that in turn uses a ‘Proof of Aboriginality’ process that is more involved than self-certification.
The data standard would benefit from some abstract thinking about how country-specific demographic needs should best be reflected within BODS-formatted data. The specific questions are:
- What should the general pattern be for extending BODS data with demographics? Remembering that demographics may be for individuals or organisations.
- Should self-certified data be logged differently from certified data? How should certification be acknowledged (often ‘certifying agency’ is available, but sometimes the certification certificate may have an ID number).
- Should there be a flag on demographic information that is stored in BODS, but shouldn’t be released publicly? Or does this logic belong outside the standard? If so, is there a generalised need for a ‘privacy schema’ and tool that can be applied to BODS to remove/anonymise particular fields?
Demographic certification is a system of ownership collection and verification, and a general understanding of the ways in which BODS should and shouldn’t be a part of that would be useful for the future of the standard.
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