444 By Susan Ariel Aaronson and David Deese With a reaction by ...

on their website, and fill out an international level self assessment (company form),which the EITI posts on its web site. As of June 2008, some thirty seven firms and manyof the major extractive industry associations have agreed to support EITI. The supportersinclude firms from South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina as well as all of the big(five). But only 18 of the 37 supporting firms had filled out a company self-assessmentform. All of the oil majors had completed this form except Conoco Phillips. That formaffirmed whether the company has published a public statement endorsing EITI; whetherit has provided links to any validations of its payments; whether someone at the companywas responsible for EITI; whether the company had attended an EITI conference; andwhether the company discussed EITI in its CSR or global sustainability reports.179There is growing evidence that firms are not sufficiently supporting the EITI ordisclosure as a means of preventing the resource curse in the countries where theyoperate. For example, in 2005, Save the Children UK examined corporate practice ondisclosure of extractive industry royalty payments. (The NGO did not aim to assess theircommitment to EITI more broadly.) The resulting study found that few companies werefully disclosing their upstream (exploration, development and production) oil and gasoperations. The researchers covered 25 companies with operations in Azerbaijan andNigeria, (among the first EITI countries) and then non-EITI nations Angola, Timor-Leste,Indonesia, and Venezuela during calendar year 2004. EITI does not require supportingcompanies to disclose payments globally or to specify on a country-by-country basisexcept in those EITI candidate countries. The researchers assessed whether firms wereproviding payments transparency; disclosing additional supportive information; anddisclosing information about anti-corruption and whistle-blowing policies.180462