Month: November 2024

What’s happening with political spending disclosure and accountability?

In this fraught election season and just before tomorrow’s important election day, the Center for Political Accountability has released its annual study, The 2024 CPA-Zicklin Index of Corporate Political Disclosure and Accountability. The report concludes that, overall, leading companies in the S&P 500 have been maintaining “established norms of political disclosure and accountability.” And  “companies are not backsliding,” with improvements showing throughout the Index. In 2016, the report discloses, “there were roughly three bottom-tier core companies for every two top-tier core companies. In 2024, over five times as many core companies placed in the top tier as in the bottom.”  And keep in mind that those norms have held firm even in the face of “fierce headwinds” against ESG for U.S. companies.  In the foreword to the report, former SEC Commissioner Robert Jackson, Jr. writes: “At a moment when our nation is narrowly divided on so much, nearly 90% of Americans agree that corporations should disclose to investors their use of corporate money on politics—even more than the 73% who took that view in 2006. The decades since have seen a financial crisis, a global pandemic and three Presidencies. Those events, and more, have divided voters. Yet the American people have grown even more firm in their conviction that, when corporations participate in the nation’s politics, it is incumbent upon those companies to carefully consider, and explain to investors, how and why they do so.”  As Jackson observes, “today, more than 20% of S&P 500 firms scored 90% or above on the Index’s accountability measures, nearly double the number from 2016,” reflecting recognition of “the benefits of independent oversight, careful controls, and transparency.” This information, he maintains, is important for investors to enable them “to decide whether, and how, to invest in American public companies.”

Be sure to VOTE! Election day is tomorrow!