Feature: Representing missing information

[kd-ods]

[This ticket helps track progress towards developing a particular feature in BODS where changes or revisions to the standard may be required. It should be placed on the BODS Feature Tracker, under the relevant status column.

See Feature development in BODS in the Handbook.

The title of this GitHub ticket should be 'Feature: XXXXX' where XXXXX is the feature name below. The information in this first post on the thread should be updated as necessary so that it holds up-to-date information. Comments on this ticket can be used to help track high-level work towards this feature or to refine this set of information.]

Feature name: Representing missing information

Feature background

What user needs are met by introducing or developing this feature in BODS? [Summarise these needs. Link to user stories, reports, blogs and other evidence where possible. Or add user stories here directly.]

BODS represents more than just company structures. It represents declarations (statements) about company structures. Therefore the schema needs to facilitate the representation of various situations where there are known gaps in the information declared and published.

Here are 10 examples of such missing information:

Example 1 The declaring company is exempt from disclosing beneficial owners on any of a given set of grounds. E.g:

• Declaring company is public and listed on a well regulated market and is exempt from disclosing beneficial owners on those grounds.
• Declaring company is a state-owned enterprise.
• Declaring company’s revenue < x.
• Declaring company is not part of a set of target economic sectors.

Example 2 Declaring company declares that a significant shareholder (direct or indirect) is a public, listed company (details undisclosed).

Example 3 Declaring company declares that nobody meets the definition of a reportable beneficial owner.

Example 4 Declaring company declares that information about potential beneficial owners has not been provided by a single upchain entity (info not retrievable). Other beneficial owners have been identified.

Example 5 Declaring company declares that information about potential beneficial owners has not been provided by a single upchain entity (because potential beneficial owner(s) unco-operative). Other beneficial owners have been identified.

Example 6 Declaring company declares that information about potential beneficial owners cannot be retrieved, details of all legal owners are supplied instead.

Example 7 A beneficial owner is granted anonymity on stated grounds.

Example 8 A company is required to make a declaration but has not done so.

Example 9 The chain of intermediaries between a declaring company and its beneficial owner is declared, but the particular interests connecting the intermediaries are unknown (and not required to be disclosed).

Example 10 A declaring person is exempt from declaring the companies they beneficially own on the grounds that they don’t have greater than an x% stake or control over a company with a turnover > $n.

Typology Looking at these examples, a typology suggests itself. When representing declarations of beneficial ownership it needs to be clear to users of the data:

• Which entities (or people, in a person-centric declaration system) are exempt from disclosing what (and why).
• What information is missing by design; that is, because declaring subjects are not required to disclose it. (See examples 2 and 9 above)
• What information is required but missing within declarations and why that information is missing; that is, declaring subjects have not disclosed what they ought to. This category can be subdivided between:
  • Information flagged by the declaring subject as being missing (e.g. because unretrievable)
  • Information simply not disclosed by the declaring subject.
• Information undiscoverable by the publisher (i.e. info that the publisher wanted to discover not via a declaring subject)
• When information has been collected but withheld from publication for legitimate reasons. (eg Example 7)

Additional requirement [added 08-02-2022]

It will often be the case that some information about owners and controlling interests is required to be disclosed in a declaration system, even when no people meet the definition of 'beneficial owner'. So however missing information within a declaration is represented in BODS, disclosed information must be able to be represented too. See the point about Liberia below.

What impact would not meeting these needs have?

If the data standard does not offer a way of representing why information is missing, then publishers may either: not represent it at all, or represent it in non-standardised ways. In either case, this will make it hard for people to correctly interpret data (especially when aggregated from different sources).

How important is it to meet the above needs?

These needs must be met in order to cover the full scope of disclosure possibilities.

How urgent is it to meet the above needs?

The standard should not reach version 1 without incorporating this feature.

Are there any obvious problems, dependencies or challenges that any proposal to develop this feature would need to address?

We already have (as of BODS 0.2) various codelist options and modeling options that go some way to addressing the above needs. However they are not complete, not well documented, and not consistent. There are - therefore - numerous issues that point to these deficiencies:

• Separate reasons for unspecified ownershipOrControlStatements into different codelists #240
• (Closed) Updates to guidance and schema around missing information and exemptions #150
• Missing information: publisher codelists #247
• Improved description and example of AnonymousEntity #269
• Proposed new interestType: 'unknown-interest' #276
• Add a "not applicable" reason for unspecified interested parties #253

We would expect these to be resolved with any proposal to address this feature in the standard.

Feature work tracking

[Link to proposals, bugs and issues in the repository to help track work on this feature]