Municipality and state-owned companies in Slovakia administer every year the state assets worth several billions of euros. Many of them are responsible for running the areas that are crucial for the country, such as transport, infrastructure, transmission systems or health insurance.
In this project we were trying to find out how open are these companies when it comes to publishing of their economic results or providing such information for citizens. We have also included several foreign companies in our rating to be able to compare the situation home and abroad.
Transparent State-owned Companies (2012) is a transparency survey of municipality and state-owned companies whose shares are owned solely by the state or municipalities. It measures information availability and accessibility as well introduced anti-corruption measures in place in 6 policy areas: I. Economic Indicators, II. Communication and Access to Information Policy, III. Public Procurement Policy, IV. Human Resources Policy, V. Ethics, and VI. Grants and Charity Policy. The companies were evaluated on the basis of their openness in these areas and the company that publishes all of the required information could get the maximum number of points (100) and the company that doesn’t publish any of this information would get 0 points.
Survey reveals the areas that are more or less problematic in publishing the information and also the areas where we can find huge differences among the evaluated companies. Moreover, it points out the areas with significant room for improvement.
The survey data comes from the official websites of the companies as well their replies to the Freedom of Information Act Requests. The evaluation took place during May and June 2012.
MORE ON METHODOLOGY
Transparent State-owned Companies (2012), a survey of Transparency International Slovakia (Transparency), measures level of transparency, quantity and quality of provided information, anti-corruption measures and openness in 60 companies: 45 Slovak companies (30 state-owned and 15 municipality-owned), 6 Czech companies, and 9 foreign companies.
Data for the survey had been collected in several ways:
- Quality of information provided on the companies’ websites (48% of the total score)
- Replies to Freedom of Information Act (211/2000), requests filled by Transparency (15% of the total score)
- Replies to Freedom of Information Act (211/2000), requests filled by Transparency’s co-workers (“mystery shopping”) (10% of the total score)
- Data on public procurement from www.tender.sme.sk portal (15% of the total score)
- Questionnaire among the journalists (7% of the total score)
- Data from the Office for Public Procurement website (5% of the total score)
POLICY AREAS ASSESED
Companies have been assessed and ranked in 6 areas. These include especially the duties vested with companies by the Freedom of Information Act (e.g. transactions with public assets or public property) as well as policy areas deemed important by Transparency for good and ethical governance (e.g. ethics, conflict of interests, human resources policy).
Out of the areas selected, economic indicators, public procurement and communication and access to information were considered as the most important (see policy areas’ score weights below). For the greater part the survey assessed a presence of a given transparency tool (e.g. Do you use e-auctions? Yes/No). Results rendered are based on publicly accessible, easily measurable and verifiable data. Maximum score for a company including all areas was 100 points. Questions and scoring details are provided here.
| POLICY AREA | SURVEY WEIGHT in % |
| I. Economic Indicators |
36 |
| II. Communication and Access to Information Policy |
21 |
| III. Public Procurement Policy |
25 |
| IV. Human Resources Policy |
5 |
| V. Ethics |
8 |
| VI. Grants and Charity Policy |
5 |
RANKING AND GRADES
Overall ranking of a company ranges from 0 % (worst) to 100 % (best). Rankings for individual policy areas are included along the total score. For a quicker comparison, municipalities have been graded as in school, according to the following scale:
|
GRADE |
% |
| A | 80-100 |
| A | 75-79 |
| A- | 70-74 |
| B+ | 65-69 |
| B | 60-64 |
| B- | 55-59 |
| C+ | 50-54 |
| C | 45-49 |
| C- | 40-44 |
| D+ | 35-39 |
| D | 30-34 |
| D- | 25-29 |
| E+ | 20-24 |
| E | 15-19 |
| E- | 10-14 |
| F | 0-9 |
Transparent State-owned Companies (2012) is just an indicator of companies openness. Although the ranking does not measure corruption, Transparency holds that higher score in the ranking and more transparent companies provide fewer opportunities for corrupt behaviour. However, it cannot be ruled out that companies high up in the ranking are not corrupt and vice versa.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS
Companies and their representatives and employees should see the Transparent State-owned Companies (2012) ranking as a motivation to improve their efforts to act in transparent manner and provide quality information. It can be also used by the Slovak companies to take an example from the best practices found in the companies abroad.
Transparency plans to update survey regularly.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Transparent State-owned Companies (2012) is sponsored by Open Society Institute. If you like this project, please consider financial donation, share this page with your friends, or become our fan on Facebook.
AUTHORS OF THE APPLICATION
2012 application is based on the 2010 Open Self-Government application programmed by buckle up (web and design). Data processes, modification of the design and content management system for 2011 was provided by MJCH.
CONTACT
Ľuba Riapošová (riaposova@transparency.sk)
Gabriel Šípoš (sipos@transparency.sk)