Methodology Flow Chart

The questionnaire comprises 34 questions. These are organised into five pillars

1. Leadership, governance, and organisation;
2. Risk assessment;
3. Company codes and policies
4. Training
5. Personnel and helplines.

The questions cover what Transparency International UK regards as the basic capability that a global defence company should have in place. Each question is assessed against a ‘model answer’, which represents a full response. The model answers were reviewed and clarified during the study to ensure consistency across companies.

The information to answer these questions should be, in Transparency International UK (TI-UK)'s view, available on the company’s website as a matter of good practice and public accountability. TI-UK collected all data by desk research between January and July 2012. The sources included company websites and the relevant links and documents directly accessible through them. Typical documents included annual reports, social responsibility reports and corporate governance sections of the website.

Thirty-four companies also provided additional internal information about their anti-corruption systems and practices. Companies were under no obligation to do so, but TI-UK had hoped that—in the spirit of raising standards across the industry—more would participate. The reasons that some companies did not choose to provide further information varied: some did not want to share confidential information with TI-UK; some said they did not have the time to respond; and some had concerns about TI-UK’s work quality or methodology.

Transparency International UK (TI-UK) used readily available public information to assess companies against the 34 questions. The draft analysis was then sent to the company for comment: this was the company’s opportunity to guide TI-UK towards other publicly available information that may have been missed, and/or to provide additional internal information. The results of the assessments for companies based on public information are presented in our index.

Where companies provided internal information, TI-UK reviewed and discussed the documents with the company. The results of this exercise, showing the impact of this information, are presented separately.

Once all assessments were completed, they went through internal and external peer reviews, after which the companies received a copy of the finalised assessment. They were also given an opportunity to make any further statements should they wish to, and these are available on the Index website. All companies that did not respond were contacted multiple times, by letter, email and telephone. The findings are based on information gathered between January and July 20, 2012, and therefore do not take account of any changes made by individual companies thereafter.

Most of the companies included in this study lie within the group of top 100 global defence companies, as measured by defence revenue in 2010. In addition, in order to have a truly global range of companies, we added companies that were of an arms-exporting nationality that were not within the top 100, but which nonetheless had either actual or estimated revenue of at least USD100 million. This resulted in a final population of 129 companies from 31 countries.

Of these, 34 provided additional company-internal information and engaged in detail with TI-UK. The companies were: BAE Systems, Bechtel Corporation, Boeing, Chemring Group, CSC, Cubic Corporation, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, Day & Zimmerman, Diehl Stiftung, DynCorp International, FLIR Systems, Fluor Corporation, Fujitsu, General Electric Aviation, Harris Corporation, Hewlett–Packard Company, Honeywell International, Indra, Jacobs Engineering, KBR Inc., Kongsberg Gruppen ASA, Lockheed Martin, Meggitt plc., Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, MTU Aero Engines GmbH, NEC Corporation, QinetiQ Group, Raytheon Company, Rockwell Collins, Saab AB, SAIC, Serco Group, ThyssenKrupp AG and Tognum. Four further companies wished to provide internal information but were too late to be able to be included. These were Accenture (Ireland), Aselsan (Turkey), Rafael Advanced Defense Systems (Israel) and Rheinmetall (Germany).

The companies are scored on the 34 questions, and then placed into one of six bands, from A to F, based on their scores. 

Band A or B mean that we have seen plentiful or good evidence that basic ethics and compliance systems and processes exist. Bands E and F represent scores from 33 per cent down to 0 per cent, indicating there is only poor or no evidence of anti-corruption processes. Bands C and D are intermediate results—either because of a mix of good and poor evidence across the index questions, or because of more uniformly average evidence.