Accountability Styles in State-Owned enterprises : The good, the bad, the ugly ... And the pretty

Abstract

Ensuring public access to the information that State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) produce is necessary and corporate websites should be used for this purpose. However, there is a lack of research analyzing the accountability of SOEs. This paper aims to identify different accountability patterns among SOEs by carrying out an assessment of the e-disclosure levels of Spanish SOEs. For this purpose, a comprehensive website content analysis of 91 SOEs owned by the Spanish central government was carried out. Each website was analyzed for 60 items classified into 4 dimensions: 1) financial information, 2) information about objectives and strategies, 3) corporate governance and 4) usability. In order to identify different accountability patterns among SOEs, cluster, multidimensional scaling and Pro-Fit analyses were carried out. Results show that e-disclosure practices among Spanish SOEs are still in their infancy. Financial accountability is the main focus of SOEs disclosures and most are silent about their policies, objectives and corporate governance structures. The majority of them are still anchored in a narrow accountability style that only considers shareholders as the key stakeholders and they are a long way from fulfilling the OECD recommendation that they should be as transparent as listed companies. Furthermore, results show that enforcement of transparency-related legislation is scarce in Spain. Based on these findings, some recommendations to improve e-disclosure practices among SOEs are suggested.