Background:

Each year Company's are legally required to publish annual disclose statements, this research will be assessing if they are compliant and how affectively UK companies report on Modern Slavery. 

We will be analysing the language used in UK modern slavery statements to understand how clearly companies describe their actions and whether they genuinely meet the reporting requirements. We will accomplish this using the AIMS annotated datasets to apply semantic analysis and identify patterns in how firms communicate risks and accountability. We will then be putting the data in to the KNIME Analytics Platform to help organise, breakdown and analyse the data.

The final goal will be to answer these core research questions:

Research Questions

1. To what extent do UK corporate modern slavery statements fulfil the mandatory reporting criteria stipulated by the Modern Slavery Act 2015?
2. To what extent do compliant disclosures demonstrate substantive intent, and to what extent do they rely on vague or unsubstantiated language?
3. How do compliance rates and disclosure quality vary across company size and industry?
4. Does the quality of disclosure in one mandatory reporting criterion predict compliance behaviour in others, and are there systematic patterns of selective or compensatory reporting?