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This analysis examines the legal parameters and potential constraints of implementing the U.S. Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). It identifies that there are no major legal impediments to the government's publication of aggregated payment data at various levels, including company-wide, payor code, and multi-lease project levels. The Trade Secrets Act is the primary law that could potentially impede government publication, but as long as information is sufficiently aggregated, there is no violation. Companies can voluntarily disclose their payments to a third-party reconciler without facing legal impediments.
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U.S. EITI Implementation:Analysis of Legal Parameters and Potential Constraints
There are no major legal impediments to publication, by the government, of aggregated payments at any of several different levels. • Those levels include payment data at the company-wide, payor code, and multi-lease project levels. • Furthermore, the government may publish leases and other agreements, since those contain only publically available information.
The Trade Secrets Act is the primary law which could impede government publication of information. • But the Trade Secrets Act only prohibits publication of information which could cause competitive harm to a company. • As long as information is published at a sufficiently aggregated level, there is no Trade Secrets Act violation.
Companies already report information to the Department at the payor code level. Because this information is already available, the Department may disclose it to a third party reconciler without fulfilling further legal requirements. • There are no federal statutory or regulatory legal impediments for companies to voluntarily disclose, on an independent basis, their payments to a third party reconciler.
