Mining the disclosures

Mining The Disclosures

Publicly traded companies that have tin, tantalum, tungsten or gold in their product supply chains that may involve conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo are required to file annually with the SEC a Conflict Mineral report. Currently ~1200 companies need to do this. In 2014 & 2015 Responsible Sourcing Network reviewed 50 & 150 companie's reports evaluating them on 20 indicators to produce information allowing investors and consumers to compare companies - http://www.sourcingnetwork.org/mining-the-disclosures

This takes a lot of time and only covers 10% of the companies filing. In addition this may be a template for similar types of disclosure analysis such as the upcoming requirement from the UK Modern Slavery Act of 2015.

Ideally companies would self-report in a structured manner. When Responsible Sourcing Network sent out a survey to the cotton supply chain they pre-populated a survey based on their own research and got good feedback for having done the pre-population

Pieces of work:

build a tool to help the data collectors fill in the data
build an interactive version of 2014/2015 that can be a template for the 2016 report
can we automate collecting the answers for the indicators
can we use semi-automated data to pre-populate surveys for the companies so that we can send it to them for them to check - hopefully increasing response rate.

Examples of hitting the api end point:

The main site is not publicly viewable

Repos for the project: