About the 2015 transparency ranking
Download: Source data (list of questions, answers – xls)
Frequently asked questions
Municipality and state-owned companies in Slovakia administer every year state assets worth several billions of euros. Many of them are responsible for running areas crucial for the country, such as transport, infrastructure, transmission systems or health insurance.
In this ranking we were trying to find out how open these companies are when it comes to publishing economic results and their public control. We have also included several foreign companies in our rating in order to be able to compare the situation at home and abroad.
The Transparent Public Companies Ranking (2015) is therefore a transparency survey of municipality and state-owned companies whose shares are owned solely by the state or municipalities. The survey evaluates the transparency of companies in six important 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, where the company that publishes all of the required information could get the maximum number of points (100) and the company that does not publish any of this information would get 0 points.
The survey reveals which areas are more or less problematic when it comes to publishing information and in which areas we can find great differences between the evaluated companies and thus also room for improvement. The ranking has been completed on the basis of information which is available on the company’s website and of information which the companies disclosed following requests for information. It has been carried out during March and April 2015.
MORE ON METHODOLOGY
The Transparency International Slovakia (Transparency) ranking measures the level of transparency, the quantity and the content of provided information, the quality of anti-corruption measures and openness of 101 companies: 81 Slovak public companies (46 state-owned , 31 city-owned and 4 county-owned), as well as 5 Slovak companies with private ownership, 5 Czech public companies and 9 foreign public companies. The data for the survey had been collected from:
- Information provided on the companies’ websites
- Replies to Freedom of Information Act (211/2000) requests from Transparency
- Replies to Freedom of Information Act (211/2000) requests from Transparency’s co-workers (“mystery shopping”)
- Data on public procurement from www.tender.sme.sk
- Data from the website of the Office for Public Procurement
POLICY AREAS ASSESSED
Companies have been assessed and ranked in 6 areas. These include both the legally-required duties to provide information (e.g. transactions concerning 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).
The highest premium in our ranking has been placed on communication and access to information, including the publishing of mandatory information such as contracts concluded. More weight was placed also on the areas of economic indicators and human resources.
In most cases, the questions reflect the existence of a certain mechanism of transparency (e.g. do you use electronic actions? Yes/No), and thus they are based on publicly accessible, easily measurable and objectively verifiable data.
Maximum score which could have been achieved for all areas was 100. All questions and scoring is available on this link.
|
Policy Area |
Weight in % |
|
Economic Indicators |
21 |
|
Communication and Access to Information |
30 |
|
Public Procurement |
11 |
|
Human Resources |
20 |
|
Ethics |
9 |
|
Grants and Charity |
9 |
RANKING AND GRADES
Overall ranking of a company ranges from 0 % to 100 %. The ranking shows not only the total percentage score of a company but also the score for individual policy areas. The ranking also shows grades for easier comparison; these were assigned based on the following scale:
|
Známka |
% |
|
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 |
The Transparent Public Companies Ranking (2015) is only a primary indicator of the companies’ openness. Transparency claims that the higher the score in the ranking, the less the space for corruption and nontransparency. By any means, however, that does not mean that a highly open company cannot be corrupt and vice versa. Good formal rules usually lead to less corruption but they do not guarantee such a result.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS
For state, city and county companies this ranking should allow mutual comparison between companies home and abroad and should inspire to follow best practices. It should also be seen as motivation, reward and encouragement to continue the good work.
Transparency plans to repeat the survey regularly.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The project is sponsored by the Open Society Institute. If you like this project, please consider supporting us financially, sharing this page or becoming our fan on Facebook.
AUTHORS OF THE APPLICATION
The application is based on the 2010 Open Self-Government application programmed by buckle up (web a design). Data processing, modification of the design and the content management system for the project have been provided by MetaApp.
CONTACT
Michal Piško pisko@transparency.sk
Gabriel Šípoš sipos@transparency.sk