America's 100 Best Corporate Citizens in 2014

In December Bristol-Myers Squibb joined the Medicines Patent Pool, an international organization in Geneva, Switzerland, that makes drugs available at low cost to people with HIV/AIDS in the developing world. The move vastly expanded access to a drug called atazanavir in 110 developing countries. The New York City-based drug giant also donated $5 million in January to the American Diabetes Association and $1 million in March to four non-profits that support patients with cancer.

Those are a few of the initiatives that landed Bristol-Myers Squibb at the top of a new list of the so-called “Best Corporate Citizens” put out today by Corporate Responsibility Magazine (CR), a journal with a circulation of 20,000, published six times a year, that’s read by CEOs, CFOs and people who work in corporate human resources and corporate social responsibility departments.

The number of lists ranking corporations’ performance keeps growing and we cover several of them, including the most ethical companies put out by consulting firm Ethisphere, the most reputable companies, a product of consulting firm Reputation Institute and the most trustworthy companies, composed by investment advisor GMI Ratings. What distinguishes CR magazine’s list is its seemingly exhaustive criteria: a list of 298 questions in seven different categories--climate change, employee relations, environment, finance, government, human rights and philanthropy. While it asks about performance, like what is the amount of a company’s annual giving, the majority of its queries are about disclosure. Examples: “Do the company’s human rights policies apply to franchisers?” “Does the company disclose its total hazardous waste generation?” “Does the company disclose the percentage of new hires that is considered to be a member of a minority group?”

Explains CR magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Bill Hatton, “A good corporate citizen doesn’t treat people and the environment as a means to an end.” To join the list, he says, “You have policies in place and you disclose what you’re doing.”

To put together its roster of 100 companies, CR starts with the Russell 1000 largest American companies by market capitalization. Then it turns its questions over to a research firm in Portland, ME called IW Financial that spends months combing through publicly available corporate records and crunching numbers. The answer to each of the questions earns a company points and then the points are tallied in each of the seven categories and given a weighting, with employee relations and environment each comprising almost 20% of the score. This is the 15^th year CR magazine has put out the list.

The good news, says Hatton: The numbers for the best-performing companies have been going up every year. In 2014, the total score for the top ten companies as a group is 24% higher than the score for the top 10 last year. “Companies see the value in acting responsibly,” he says. A positive CSR image also helps attract top employees. “People like to work for the company wearing the white hat.”

No. 2 on the list is another drug maker which also produces medical devices and consumer products, Johnson & Johnson . Like Squibb, it has racked up an impressive corporate responsibility track record. In the realm of transparency the company took a bold step in February, making all its clinical trial data available to scientists around the world through Yale University’s Open Data Access Project. Writing in The New York Times, Yale cardiology professor Harlan Krumholz called the project “a reversal of the industry’s traditional tendency to treat data as an asset that would lose value if exposed to public scrutiny.” J&J has also committed to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, through programs that aim to improve maternal and child health, including wide distribution of a drug called mebendazole, which treats intestinal worms in children. In addition, the company eliminated potentially harmful chemicals like formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane in all of its baby products, including its popular baby shampoo, and it’s pledged to remove them from adult products like Neutrogena by 2015.

In third place: Gap Inc. Among its corporate responsibility efforts is a program that teaches basic skills like health awareness, literacy, stress management and verbal communication to women garment workers in developing countries including Cambodia and India; so far the program has reached 25,000 women. The company has also pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 20% between 2008 and 2015, and it’s been expanding a youth program called This Way Ahead, that offers job training and internships to underserved young people in New York City and San Francisco.

Once CR magazine gets its information from IW Financial, it cross checks each company through its own search of ongoing litigation, issuing what it calls “yellow cards” and “red cards” to companies with legal problems.

It so happens that No. 1-rated Bristol-Myers got a yellow card this year because of ongoing mass tort litigation involving its 90-acre New Brunswick, NJ plant, where plaintiffs allege that the company produced drugs including arsenic-laced medications that released harmful waste into the atmosphere, water and soil, and that the emissions caused diseases like cancer. Though the company has been working on cleaning up the site, the legal action is ongoing.

Hatton points out that the company has scored quite well in recent years. It was No. 3 last year and No. 1 in 2012. CR’s decision to put the company at the top of its lists is striking given other bad publicity Bristol-Myers has gotten in the past, including charges that it had inflated drug prices, paid kickbacks to doctors and promoted its anti-psychotic drug Abilify for unapproved uses. The company has had plenty of other problems that would call into question its image as an upstanding corporate citizen, like charges that it made false statements to U.S. government agencies about negotiations with a Canadian drugmaker to delay release of a generic version of the blockbuster drug-thinning drug Plavix. But Bristol-Myers has settled those matters and based on its publicly available documents, CR has preserved its high ranking.

Another yellow card went to Occidental Petroleum, No. 62 on the list, which is the target of ongoing litigation brought by the Achuar, an indigenous group in northeast Peru that alleges the Los Angeles-based oil company polluted the Amazonian rain forest, dumping 850,000 gallons a day of toxic waste into the watershed.

A third yellow card went to Computer Sciences Corporation, No. 90 on the list, the target of a securities suit that alleged the company hid problems with a contract to provide software to the UK’s National Health Service. The company settled the suit for $97.5 million in May 2013.

One company that CR knocked off the list: Pacific Gas & Electric, which IW Financial had listed in 75^th place. But CR gave it a so-called “red card” because the company faces 12 federal felony charges over its role in a fatal 2010 gas pipeline explosion that killed eight people, injured dozens more and destroyed 38 homes in San Bruno, CA. The company’s CEO, Anthony Early, Jr., has said it holds itself responsible, that it is deeply sorry, and is trying to do right by the victims.

The yellow and red cards should be a signal that this list underlines the corporate responsibility initiatives put forth in the companies’ publicly available documents. It means the top-rated companies are doing the best job of appearing responsible. Not to discount the positive things those companies are doing, but CR magazine’s small staff and limited resources can’t probe beyond what’s known on the surface.

Corporate Responsibility Magazine's 100 Best Corporate Citizens: