Effective access to beneficial ownership information
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Summary
To ensure beneficial ownership transparency reforms meet their objectives, a range of implementation design decisions need to be made. The combination of these decisions about the rules, laws, and systems that enable access to beneficial ownership information – that is, the access regime – will have a bearing on the effectiveness of the reforms. This briefing offers considerations for developing an access regime, including to whom beneficial ownership information should be accessible, for which purpose, and in what ways. Taking into account ongoing debates about the balance between privacy and access to information, this briefing suggests governments should strive for approaches that put the principles of usability and responsibility at their core in order to create systems that are enduring, accountable, and impactful.
Key points
- Debates and policy solutions for how to best strike the balance between access to beneficial ownership information and privacy are continuing to evolve.
- Research with users of beneficial ownership information shows that – across all policy goals – a range of different user groups play complementary roles to achieving impact. Designing effective access regimes requires expanding the conversation from whether information should be made available to the public to understanding what information users need, and how they should be able access and use it.
- Mapping out a country’s context – including clarifying the objectives of the reforms, reviewing obligations under national data protection as well as other legal frameworks and commitments to international standards, and identifying all relevant users and their needs – is foundational to designing an access regime.
- Building on this mapping, agencies in charge of beneficial ownership transparency reforms can design access provisions that are privacy sensitive and user centred, and thereby ensure that access to BO information is effective, responsible, and sustainable. This means the reforms meet the needs of users of beneficial ownership information; respect rights, minimising risks of abuse and ensuring accountability; and ensure the disclosure regime is robust and able to withstand potential legal challenges.
- At the centre of effective, responsible, and sustainable access to beneficial ownership information is the creation of different layers of access with distinct characteristics. The briefing outlines key considerations for doing this both for the development of new access regimes and for iterative improvements to existing ones.
- The design of access layers builds on an initial mapping of reform objectives, legal obligations, and user needs. Layers are typically defined by: who can access them and for what purpose; which information is accessible through them and in which format; how flexibly the information can be used; and what safeguards are in place to prevent and detect misuse of information, including by government users. Multiple user groups can have access to the same layer. Each layer should have data usability at its core, and implementers should consider privacy and data protection in this process.
- Providing public access is the easiest way to ensure the broadest range of relevant users have access to some beneficial ownership information, as it removes many of the frictions associated with other forms of more restricted access and divergence in access systems. Yet, maintaining an access layer for the general public (e.g. through a basic portal) will itself not be sufficient to guarantee impact, as it may not fully meet the needs of all user groups.
- For additional access layers restricted to certain users with increased flexibility of data use, various requirements can be put in place – such as authentication of permissions and limiting access to sensitive and protected information – to maximise data usability while taking into account privacy and data protection.
- Additional safeguards such as use terms, protection regimes, and audit logs and trails can be implemented across different layers to support the responsible use of data as well as to ensure purpose limitation and accountability in cases of misuse. However, under no circumstance should information on who has accessed beneficial ownership information be shared with the legal vehicles or beneficial owners in question.
