Improving corporate political donations disclosure: lessons from Australia

One of the activities corporations should be accountable for is their level of political donations. This paper examines two mandatory corporate political donation disclosure regimes in Australia and identifies three important lessons. First, our review confirms that although few citizens may care enough to scrutinise donation disclosure, there are people interested in such information and we should take political donation disclosure regimes seriously. Second, a well-funded entity must be made responsible not just for administering the disclosure system, but also for reviewing and recommending updates to the system. One disclosure regime examined in this paper was never updated to reflect the existence of the internet until 2007, because no-one was responsible for monitoring the regime and suggesting necessary updates. Finally, details concerning the ultimate source of donations should be provided.