Full disclosure of Carrier’s lobbying activities and expenditures is needed to assess whether its lobbying is consistent with its expressed goals and shareholder interests. Carrier spent $8.2 million from 2020 - 2023 on federal lobbying. This does not include state lobbying, where Carrier also lobbies but disclosure is uneven or absent. For example, Carrier spent $439,000 on lobbying in California from 2020-2023. Companies can give unlimited amounts to third party groups that spend millions on lobbying and often undisclosed grassroots activity. These groups may be spending “at least double what’s publicly reported.” Carrier fails to disclose its payments to trade associations and social welfare groups (SWG), or the amounts used for lobbying, to shareholders. Carrier discloses memberships in the Business Roundtable and National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which together have spent over $625 million on federal lobbying since 1998, and fails to disclose memberships in social welfare groups that lobby, like the Alliance for Competitive Taxation.
Carrier’s lack of disclosure presents reputational risk when its lobbying contradicts company public positions. For example, Carrier publicly supports addressing climate change and, as a provider of healthy, safe, sustainable and intelligent building and cold chain solutions, ranked eighth on Barron’s 2023 list of the 100 most sustainable companies.2 Yet the Business Roundtable filed an amicus brief opposing the Securities and Exchange Commission climate risk disclosure rules3 and NAM leverages its “influence to obstruct climate policy progress in the U.S. at the federal, state and local levels.”4 Reputational damage stemming from these misalignments could harm shareholder value. Shareholders ask Carrier to expand its lobbying disclosure.