Industry told to lead offset reforms or face 'scandals'

Global offset practices must be reformed if the defence sector is not to suffer "scandals" in the future, a director of a leading international organisation has warned.

"The [defence] industry has done a lot of quite credible work to raise standards across the sector, but this doesn't extend to offsets," argued Mark Pyman, director for the International Defence Programme of non-government organisation Transparency International on 25 January. "What's missing is sector-wide action to raise transparency, and this is not 'mission impossible'."

Addressing the Offsets 2010 - International Industrial Co-Operation conference in Brussels, Belgium, (an event organised by UK information services specialist SMi Group), Pyman called for trade bodies to take a more active role in helping the defence sector to raise levels of "integrity, accountability and transparency" in offset packages.

Pyman added that, in the view of his organisation, offsets departments across the defence sector were "quite often not very experienced", and that the entire practice of offsets is "overdue for reform".