Today, the nation’s premier benchmarking of U.S. companies for transparency and accountability of their political spending expands its coverage, from rating S&P 500 companies to evaluating the entire Russell 1000.
The CPA-Zicklin Index of Corporate Political Disclosure and Accountability is a nonpartisan scorecard. Its expansion gives attention to large and medium-cap U.S. companies that are not S&P 500 components. This will help protect more shareholders and others concerned about increasing risks of company political spending.
“Our expanded Index breaks new ground. It provides a baseline for bringing sunlight and accountability to those U.S. companies beyond the S&P 500,” said CPA President Bruce Freed and Prof. William S. Laufer, of The Wharton School and Director of the Carol and Lawrence Zicklin Center for Governance and Business Ethics.
“[C]orporations continue to pour billions of dollars into political coffers around the country, with little transparency, and thus little accountability, for the political spending decisions made in the twelve years since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizen’s United opened the spigot on corporate political spending,” former
Securities and Exchange Commission Acting Chair and Commissioner Allison Herren Lee wrote in the Index foreword. “The trend lines in the CPA-Zicklin Index over the
past decade show some laudable increases in transparency, but the analyses also show that non-transparency around corporate influence in the political process remains a significant issue.”
According to the newest Index, there is a dramatic gap between transparency and accountability for political spending by S&P 500 companies and by the Russell 1000’s roughly 500 companies that are not S&P 500 components….