19 December 2019.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed a new version of a rule mandating the disclosure of payments by oil, gas and mining companies to foreign governments—one that seeks to lessen the compliance burden on those companies...By carving out exceptions to the disclosure rule and softening key definitions...the SEC now faces stiff opposition from the nongovernmental organizations and anticorruption groups that lobbied to have the requirement added to Dodd-Frank. “This proposal completely guts the law and fails to meet the original anticorruption purpose of the law,” said Zorka Milin, a senior legal adviser for Global Witness...

Dodd Frank was a financial regulation reform bill approved by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The section of the bill at issue requires oil, gas and mining companies to disclose annually their payments to foreign governments related to natural resource extraction...The SEC’s latest proposal, unveiled Wednesday, would still require public disclosure of reports regarding payments by oil, gas and mining companies. But information on payments in most cases would be aggregated at a national level, instead of on a contract-by-contract basis. That would be of no use to watchdog groups looking to hold companies accountable for potentially corrupt payments, said Kathleen Brophy, the director of Publish What You Pay US...