Lifting the Veil on Tens of Billions in Oil Company Payments to Governments

Tutu Alicante was studying in the United States when his sister, suffering from an ectopic pregnancy, was rushed to the hospital back home in Equatorial Guinea. It was 1996, a year after Mobil had discovered oil off the country’s coast. When she arrived at the hospital, Alicante recounted recently, there was no power and no doctor. His sister bled to death.

In 2014, Alicante said, his father was rushed to the same hospital and found similar conditions, and he, too, died. Over 18 years, Mobil’s oil field had brought soaring economic growth to Equatorial Guinea, but that wealth had failed to transform life for many of the nation’s poor, Alicante said.

Alicante is the executive director of EG Justice, a U.S.-based nonprofit focused on corruption in Equatorial Guinea, and he told this story during a recent webinar highlighting new securities filings from American oil and mining companies. The reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are 14 years in the making, and for the first time reveal payments made by extractive companies to governments around the world, including the U.S. federal government.

The disclosures detail tens of billions of dollars in taxes, royalties and other payments last year from ExxonMobil, Chevron and other corporations. A chief goal was to discourage or uncover the corruption and unfair deals that have helped explain why oil, gas and minerals have often brought wealth to elites and economic growth to poor countries while failing to substantially lift many citizens’ standard of living.

“For many of the people listening today, the issues we are discussing here might be about billions of dollars or about numbers,” Alicante said. “For a majority of people in my country, the issues we are here to talk about are issues of life and death: Who lives a posh life with Lamborghinis and Ferraris and private jets,” he added, “and who dies an avoidable death.”

For the first time, Equatoguineans can see exactly how much ExxonMobil paid their government, for example—$189.2 million last year distributed among two ministries and the national petroleum company. That was a relatively small sum for Exxon, which reported paying $32 billion to 28 countries.

Chevron reported $16.6 billion in payments across 17 countries.

The disclosure rule applies to oil, gas and mining companies that file annual reports with the SEC. Some foreign corporations that also trade on overseas stock exchanges, like Shell, have already been subject to similar disclosure rules in other countries.

The reports are meant to help civil society groups and citizens match payments from companies to data reported by their governments or in individual contracts. Discrepancies would raise a flag for possible corruption.

One of the most striking revelations, however, has been the discrepancy in taxes paid to different countries, said Aubrey Menard, a senior policy advisor for natural resource justice at Oxfam America.

“What is revealing in the U.S. is that we are likely getting a bad deal,” Menard said in an interview. The United States is the largest source of oil and gas for Exxon and Chevron, she noted, “and yet they’re paying far more in taxes to other countries.”

Exxon, for example, produced about a third of its oil and 30 percent of its gas in the United States last year, more than in any other jurisdiction. Yet the company reported paying nearly five times more in taxes to the United Arab Emirates—$5.6 billion. If you include all types of payments, Exxon reported paying five countries more than it did the U.S. federal government.

Chevron reported paying more to two countries and a similar amount to Angola as it did to the U.S. federal government, despite about half of its oil and gas production coming domestically. 

Exxon declined to comment for this article but published a lengthy disclaimer along with its disclosure, saying, “The narrow focus of this report makes it challenging to draw meaningful comparisons of payments across countries.” The statement said Exxon paid more than $10 billion in taxes and duties, about one-fifth its global total, in the United States—the disclosures do not require companies to report payments to state and local governments. 

Exxon added: “Payments to different governments vary due to factors like resource type, project start-up timing, whether payments are controlled by ExxonMobil or third parties, and whether third parties or partners are considered government entities.”

Chevron said in a statement that comparisons between countries “are difficult” because U.S. state taxes were not included and because royalty structures differ across jurisdictions. In most countries, for example, oil and gas are publicly owned. In the United States, minerals are owned privately unless on public land, meaning the bulk of royalties go to private citizens rather than the government.

Zorka Milin, policy director for the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, an alliance of advocacy groups, said the oil industry fought more detailed disclosure of state and local government payments that might have improved comparisons. Beyond that, she said, companies could have made these additional disclosures voluntarily.

“Nothing is stopping them,” Milin said. “This is a minimum standard.”

Even without perfect comparisons between countries, Milin said, the tax data could inform a conversation about why payments in the United States are comparatively low. The information will be especially valuable as Congress debates the extension or replacement of corporate tax cuts enacted in 2017 that will expire next year.

The Biden administration has proposed reforming and repealing fossil fuel tax benefits that it says could raise $110 billion over a decade. 

Milin said she thought it was these tax revelations, more than anything, that prompted oil companies to oppose the rules.

“They feel embarrassed,” she said, “and they should feel embarrassed.”

“In a lot of these communities, the negative costs of these projects are very palpable.”

— Zorka Milin, Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition

While the United States might be receiving relatively less in taxes from oil companies, advocates say many other nations are getting bad deals, too.

“A vast percentage of concessions that are obtained by companies are predatory,” Simon Taylor, a co-founder and director of the advocacy group Global Witness, said during the webinar. “They involve egregious fiscal terms that essentially amount to them being profitable for the companies solely because they’re a rip-off for the state concerned.”

Taylor said the disclosures could be particularly instructive in light of global commitments to phase-out fossil fuels. Increasing production costs and the pressure to transition to renewable energy are expected to squeeze oil industry profits. The disclosures could highlight whether governments are striking deals less favorable to their citizens.

The reports, filed last month, were required by an amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010, which directed the SEC to implement a new rule. The commission’s first attempt was struck down in 2013 in a legal challenge brought by the American Petroleum Institute and other business groups. The SEC then wrote a new rule, but that was repealed with the Congressional Review Act after Donald Trump was elected. The signing was one of Trump’s first acts as president.

The final rules are missing some elements that advocates had pushed for and which were included in earlier versions. Perhaps most important, Milin said, is that companies are not required to report payments on a contract level but can group together all projects within a state or province.

“In a lot of these communities, the negative costs of these projects are very palpable,” Milin said. The disclosures were meant to show communities exactly how much was flowing to the government tied to those projects.

Even without that detail, Milin argued that the disclosures can serve as an example for people who are trying to push for policies opposed by the oil industry.

“This is kind of an instructive story of how big powerful oil interests did not want to see this reform happen, and they threw everything at it, and they won some things but didn’t carry the day,” Milin said. “I think that is something hopeful.”