Transparency initiative annual report

Name of the company
Date of the testing
1	Bahar Energy Limited	21 October 2016
2	Lukoil Overseas Shah-Deniz Ltd.	4 October 2016
3	Naftiran Intertrade Co (NICO) Limited	21 October 2016
4	Itochu Oil Exploration (Azerbaijan) Inc.	4 November 2016
5	Neftechala Investments Limited	21 October 2016
6	Total E & P Azerbaijan B.V	25 October 2016

We have obtained reasonable assurance on the amounts stated by the companies. We vouched the recorded amounts from the reporting templates to original supporting documents including:

Profit tax declarations;

Payment orders

Letters on transfer to relevant government agencies; Reconciliation acts; and Act of acceptance of gas.

In order to ensure the completeness of the figures in the Report, we have verified the documents for the purpose of obtaining sufficent evidence that the amounts to be paid to the state by the companies occurred.

9. RECOMMENDATIONS AND RESULTS

9.1. Lessons learned from the 2015 reconciliation

We have prepared the report for the year ended 31 December 2015 based on the experience of previous years.

During the reconciliation process we have observed that the extractive companies made common mistakes while filling into the Reporting templates. Common errors were due to rounding issues, omitting figures from the Reporting templates, including amounts and volumes which should not be included in the Reports and etc.
We recommend that seminars and training should be organised for the participants of the reconciliation process. It would increase the level of productivity and decrease the number of recurrent errors repeated each year. During the seminar, we made recommendations to help the companies to decrease repeated mistakes. In addition, EITI Secretariat should send errors table to Companies apart from formal letter and report templates.
The reporting period for the companies and government agencies has been appointed from 14 July to 1 August 2015. The extractive companies and government agencies delayed the submission of Report due to short period.
The delays in the reconciliation process of 2015 has been due to the late submission of reports to the Independent Administrator. In the following years we recommend extension of the reporting duration.
In accordance with the RFP and EITI Requirement # 4.9 to ensure the credibility of submitted data, the companies and government agencies were required to have their reporting templates signed by a senior official.
Despite the fact that the companies and government agencies have the Reporting templates signed by the senior official, our recommendation for forthcoming years is for them to undertake necessary steps to ensure that reports submitted by extractive companies and government agencies are certified by an independent external auditor. It will decrease the number of errors made by the companies during the submission of reporting templates each year.
We have used open and official sources during the collection of other information required by the EITI Standards.
Since some data needed for the Report is placed in official sources with delays we recommend to extend the duration of the preparation of the Report from July to October.