Testing the Commission's register

HOW THE REGISTER WORKS

Those expected to register are: “all entities engaged in activities carried out with the objective of influencing the policy formulation and decision-making processes of the European institutions”.

The European Commission defines these as interest representatives and says that not every person or organisation on the register is a lobbyist.

To get on the register, an organisation has to sign up to a code of conduct, promising to be transparent about who it is representing to whom.

Registrants also have to disclose financial information:
i) Professional consultancies and law firms lobbying the EU institutions have to disclose the total revenue from all clients for lobbying all the institutions. They then have to list, in decreasing order of contract value, the clients for whom they have been lobbying. The registrant has to give an idea of the value of work from each client, putting them in brackets of €50,000 or in percentage of total revenue, in brackets of 10%. The registrant is free to choose whether to list by monetary values or percentages.
ii) Trade associations and in-house lobbyists have to give an estimate of the cost of “direct lobbying of all the EU institutions”. The Commission suggests that for organisations with an office in Brussels, the estimate would start from the overall budget spent for the office, with the cost of non-lobbying activities
deducted.
iii) Non-governmental organisations and think-tanks have to publish their overall budget and give the main sources of  funding.

The register is published online. The Commission says the aim of the register is to let citizens know what interests are influencing the decision-making process of the European institutions “and the resources mobilised to that end”.