Assessing the Anti-Corruption Disclosure Practices in the UK FTSE 100 Extractive Firms

Abstract

This paper considers the anti-corruption disclosure reporting of the large UK-quoted extractive companies from 2003 to 2019. This period includes the introduction of the 2010 UK Bribery Act, which might be expected to influence corporate disclosure. It takes content analysis metrics from the environmental reporting literature, which is a more developed area of research, and considers an area with a higher volume of corporate disclosures. It applies these metrics to investigate the trends in corruption reporting over time and the impact of the introduction of the Act on reporting breadth and depth. We find that some of the metrics would appear to add more insight than others in this new context. We conclude that the volume of reporting has grown over time, but this would seem to be in breadth, more questions addressed rather than more depth to the answers given. There has been a step-change in reporting since the introduction of the Act, though concluding whether this has increased quality may depend on your perspective and interest as a user of the information.