TISCreport Transparency Certification FAQ

"I pledge to champion transparency within our organisation, uniting with the corporate transparency movement to strengthen trust and collective action for our planet and its people."

You can find out more about the pledge before signing up on TISCreport.org via your workspace.

The pledge is a commitment to ethical practices and transparency, aligning with global standards. It does not prescribe specific actions but encourages a culture of openness and accountability.

This pledge is designed to complement and enhance your existing values and policies, fostering a culture of trust and integrity that benefits all stakeholders.

The pledge is crafted to respect legal and regulatory frameworks. It promotes transparency within the bounds of your legal obligations and industry regulations.

Signing the pledge can significantly boost your reputation and stakeholder trust. The risks are minimal as the pledge is a statement of intent rather than a binding contract.

In contrast, there is a growing evidence base of the benefits of signing this pledge available for you to access by signing up for more information on https://insights.tiscreport.org/transparency-pledge

This pledge can strengthen stakeholder relationships by demonstrating your commitment to transparency and ethical practices. Critical to this is communicating your pledge to your stakeholders. TISCreport has prepared resources for you to use in order to do this as part of our certification process.

We provide guidelines and support to help you implement transparency best practices via our platform. The changes are scalable and can be adapted to your organisation's size and sector.

Our platform offers tools and metrics to track and report your progress, making it easy to communicate your achievements to stakeholders. It is our mission to help you by doing as much of the heavy lifting as possible.

The pledge is worded to respect the need to protect competitive and proprietary information. It promotes transparency in areas that do not compromise your competitive edge.

This pledge aligns with long-term strategic goals centred around sustainability, corporate responsibility, and stakeholder trust, key pillars for future-oriented businesses. Equally, if those pillars are not the foundations of your strategic goals, taking the pledge can be viewed as a first step in making those commitments.

The pledge is designed to integrate smoothly with your existing processes, with minimal disruption. It can also enhance employee engagement and morale by aligning with values of transparency and integrity. Pledging permits your employees to have conversations around transparency and accountability, and can be used to lead your organisation by example.

The pledge is backed by a respected and credible platform, positively recognised for advocating corporate transparency and ethical practices.

Yes! It is your personal intention and commitment to Transparency as an officer of your organisation that qualifies you, and you are not committing your organisation to anything by signing. If you need board approval to be transparent about that commitment (publicly, online, offline..) then your primary focus must be on making the business case for Transparency and identifying the key blockers in being be public about signing the pledge. Luckily we can help you on the way!

The pledge is designed to be generic enough to be easy to sign. If it is difficult to commit at such a low level it would be indicative of a greater problem within their organisation. Identifying the key barriers to this low level of transparency can really help when it comes to accountability, and in working with your suppliers to make it easier, you will automatically help them be better. Introduce them to TISCreport tools as part of your commitment and you can track their sign-ups as part of your own transparency performance.

In the meantime, tracking the willingness or reluctance of company officers to sign the pledge can provide valuable insights into the corporate culture and governance of different organisations. This data can be used to:

• Identify Industry Trends: Understanding which sectors or types of companies are more open to such pledges can highlight broader industry trends in transparency and corporate responsibility.

• Guide Stakeholder Engagement: This information can be useful for investors, customers, and partners in making informed decisions about their engagements with these companies.

• Inform Advocacy and Policy Making: Data on corporate openness to transparency can inform advocacy groups and policymakers in their efforts to promote ethical business practices.

• Benchmarking and Best Practices: Organisations that readily embrace such pledges can be studied as benchmarks or best practice examples for others in their industry.

Internal Reflection and Change: For companies hesitant to sign, this could spark internal discussions and potentially lead to positive changes in their policies and practices.

The commitment is flexible. We understand that organisational capacities evolve, and our platform accommodates varying levels of engagement over time.

TISCreport aims to overcome several challenges through the transparency score, including greenwash, fear of losing competitive advantage, the complexity of global supply chains, high costs of comprehensive reporting, and the lack of a standardised framework for non-financial reporting. By addressing these challenges, the score helps companies not only measure but also improve their transparency.

The Transparency Score provides a quantifiable measure of a company's transparency efforts, helping them to benchmark against peers, identify areas for improvement, and enhance their reputation. It also assists in attracting ethical investors and socially responsible investment funds, aligning with growing consumer demand for ethical business practices.

The fundamentals level of scoring covers social and corporate governance metrics that can be automatically tracked and aggregated into a single score.

The full transparency scoring, which is encompassed in the comprehensive Exemplar level, covers a wide range of areas. These  include corporate governance, sustainability and CSR reporting, ethics and compliance, stakeholder engagement, risk management, supply chain transparency, public disclosures, lobbying and political contributions, data privacy and security, and more.

The TISCreport Transparency Score uses a variety of metrics to evaluate corporate compliance behaviors, particularly focusing on Social and Governance aspects. Here are some of the key metrics included in the score:

Gender Pay Gap Reporting

Description: Assesses a company's commitment to gender equality and fair employment practices.

Compliance Criteria: Companies with 250 employees or more must submit an annual Gender Pay Gap report.

Payment Practices and Performance Reporting

Description: Evaluates the timeliness and fairness of a company's payment practices to its suppliers.

Compliance Criteria: Large companies are required to report biannually on their payment practices.

UK Modern Slavery Act Compliance

Description: Measures a company's efforts to identify, prevent, and address forms of modern slavery within its operations and supply chains.

Compliance Criteria: Large companies must publish a Modern Slavery Statement if their turnover exceeds £36M.

Up to Date Accounts on Companies House Website

Description: Indicates financial transparency and accountability by maintaining current financial records publicly.

Compliance Criteria: All UK companies must submit their financial accounts to Companies House.

XBRL Accounts Available on Companies House Website

Description: Supports transparent and efficient financial reporting by providing accounts in a format that facilitates accessibility and comparability.

Compliance Criteria: Companies must file their accounts and tax computations in iXBRL format. This is currently optional but soon to be mandatory, at which point the quality of the submission will become more significant.

Corporate Website

Description: Serves as a primary channel for disclosing a wide range of corporate information.

Compliance Criteria: If a company has a website, it must display registered information such as company name, registration details, VAT number, etc.

Accessibility Compliant Website

Description: Demonstrates a company's commitment to inclusivity by ensuring that its website is accessible to individuals with disabilities.

Compliance Criteria: Websites should comply with W3C WAI guidelines as much as possible.

Alternative Social Media Channels Listed on Website

Description: Enhances transparency by providing stakeholders with additional methods of communication.

Compliance Criteria: All social media channels should be listed on the company's website and consistently referred to across profiles.

Responsiveness to Social Media

Description: Reflects a company's engagement with stakeholders through timely responses to transparency queries on social media platforms.

Compliance Criteria: Social media teams should be knowledgeable about corporate transparency data and respond within stated times.

Persons with Significant Control Filed on Companies House Website

Description: Enhances corporate governance transparency by disclosing information about individuals who have significant control over the company.

Compliance Criteria: PSC information must be correctly and up-to-date filed to Companies House.

These metrics are designed to provide a comprehensive view of a company's transparency in various areas, focusing on both quantitative data and qualitative assessments to ensure a balanced and thorough evaluation. Critical to this is that these metrics can be assessed in an automated way, forming a solid foundation for a corporate transparency measure that considers indicators of good corporate behaviour.

The scoring framework is designed to be flexible, accounting for industry-specific, geographic, and size-related nuances. This includes developing sector-specific benchmarks and adjusting for the scale of operations, ensuring that the score reflects the unique contexts within which companies operate.

The scoring system is designed with scalability in mind, offering simplified reporting options for SMEs and providing resources or tools to aid in compliance. This ensures that smaller companies are not unduly disadvantaged and can also showcase their transparency efforts.

The methodology includes regular audits, third-party verification, and a focus on evidence-based outcomes to ensure that the scores accurately reflect genuine transparency efforts and are not susceptible to manipulation.

You can join the TISCreport community, participate in the survey to provide feedback on the pilot score, and share the survey link with your stakeholders to help refine and propagate the metric. This collaborative approach ensures the score is robust, relevant, and capable of driving meaningful change in corporate practices.

Real-time or near-real-time reporting allows companies to provide timely insights into their operations, significantly reducing the information lag that can prevent stakeholders from making informed decisions. This type of reporting can enhance trust and credibility with stakeholders by showing transparency in corporate activities as they happen.

TISCreport transparency reports are intended to provide a snapshot of contextual ESG data that is publicly available in relation to specific organisations/corporate bodies. The aim is to aggregate key indicators of corporate behaviour that enables the public and external organisations (buyers, suppliers, regulators, governments etc) to be able to assess self-reported information in the context of compliance and accreditation related behaviours. The information is aggregated to enable our users to make their own judgements and check facts against other trusted third party sources. There are many conflicting data sets across multiple authority websites. We hope our work in bringing it all together will help us establish a baseline of truth in relation to corporate actions on human rights and climate change.  The greater the transparency of an organisation. the more trustworthy it can be deemed to be in its dealings with regards to our planet and the people on it. 

In order to achieve our corporate transparency mission, our bots act as the "outsiders", gathering publicly available data shared by corporate entities in multiple public repositories and registers.

Our TISCbots trawl many places, from the corporate websites we have on record for those organisations to government registers and third party registers. We also fold in information provided by both buyers and suppliers, and rely on human input to train our bots to improve the quality of data they find. Companies House in the UK is fantastic, along with Open Corporates, which enables us to be a global platform.  We attribute all public data sources with links to enable a human "outsider" to create their own context. Our "Internet of Connected Entities" is overlaid ontop of available compliance, accreditation and classification data in order to create contextual ESG data within a supply chain transparency framework.  

We use the definitions detailed in the UK Companies Act 2006. Large companies are classified as meeting two out of the three following thresholds:

• £36 million annual turnover
• 250 employees
• £18 million Balance Sheet Total

Medium sized enterprises are classified as such if meeting two out of three of the following thresholds:

• Less than £36 Million turnover
• Not more than £18 million balance sheet total
• Not more than 250 employees

Small companies are classified as such if they meet two or more of the following requirements:

• Less than £10.2 Million turnover
• Not more than £5.1 million balance sheet total
• Not more than 50 employees

The thresholds for medium-sized parent companies are as follows:

• Aggregate turnover: Not more than £36 million net (or £43.2 million gross)
• Aggregate balance sheet total: Not more than £18 million net (or £21.6 million gross)
• Aggregate number of employees: Not more than 250