“Countries rich in resources are often mired in poverty,” began the report on oil and gas companies that the international NGO Transparency International tackles.

The report, titled Promoting Revenue Transparency: 2011, evaluates companies in three areas: anti-corruption programmes, organisational disclosure and country-level disclosure of financial and technical data.

They rate 44 companies on their levels of transparency, which represents 60 per cent of global oil and gas production.

Data collected revealed very different results for each section analysed, according to the report’s authors. But they concluded that “On average, companies performed relatively well on organisational disclosure, worse on reporting on anti-corruption programmes and very poorly on country-level disclosure.”

For reporting on anti-corruption programmes the average score was 43 per cent, however, this section had the highest number of zero-scoring companies, eight of which were awarded no points for their anti-corruption reporting programmes. Two of them are from the Middle East: Algerian Sonatrach and Iranian NIOC.

For organisational disclosure, the average score was 65 per cent, with only one company scoring zero.

When evaluating country-level disclosure, the international and domestic operations were done separately. For disclosure on international operations, the average score was 16 per cent, with five companies scoring zero. Domestic operations results were considerably better; the average score was 53 per cent, with four companies scoring zero.

“If companies were more transparent about the payments they make to governments to exploit oil and gas resources there would be less room for corruption and more money available for development,” highlighted the authors of the report who don’t deny an improvement in revenue reporting, but believe that much more needs to be done.