Are companies receiving grants transparent? The social impact in Spain and its evaluation

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is the proposal of a model framework, named as “Business Transparency of Enterprises that receive Grants” (TESUB), which will, afterwards, be applied to evaluate how these private enterprises communicate and share information when the transferor of such information is a public administration body. A prior proposal of indicators has been designed, those indicators have been contrasted with the ones present in the Spanish system of transparency accreditation, to develop a model that makes possible the certification of transparency. The model presents three groups of transparency, the one related with mandatory reporting of information due to the new transparency laws, the one related with their actual published information (regarding the principles of transparency and stoppage of money laundering. International Transparency-Spain) and the one linked with voluntary reported information (that follows the three dimensions of Corporate Social Responsibility). The methodology for evaluation and monitoring of the Public Activity Transparency has been used as a reference model to create TESUB, as it is a model targeted to private companies, with the intention to provide to our model framework with more methodological strength and to have an additional instrument of both quantitative and qualitative measurement, with a valuation that reside on the quality of the supplied information and the website. TESUB makes possible to value the concept of transparency as a whole since it works with three main evaluation indicators which provide specific measurement of each, that at the same time can be added, and in addition it segregates the data by components of the active advertising which will assent to the identification of improvement areas.