The U.S. government finally acknowledged Friday it cannot determine which refiners and smelters around the world are financially fueling violence in the war-torn Congo region.
The Commerce Department published a list of more than 400 sites from Australia to Brazil and Canada, but said it "does not have the ability to distinguish" which are being used to fund militia groups. The vast majority of the sites on the department's list are small operators, although it also includes a handful of larger corporations such as U.S.-based Asarco Inc. and Germany's H.C. Starck Group. Many of the firms on the list have already been certified as conflict-free.
The department missed its original January 2013 deadline, under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, to list "all known conflict mineral processing facilities world-wide." In June, the Government Accountability Office blasted the department for the delay, which the Commerce Department has blamed on the time required to track artisanal miners in eastern Congo that smelt small amounts of these metals, and locating guerrilla operations where makeshift smelters process metals to ship overseas.
The inconclusive report underscores the challenges faced by hundreds of U.S. public companies that also had to comply with the rule and file reports on their efforts to discover conflict minerals in their supply chains by June 2.
Companies including Intel Corp.  and Apple Inc. said they spent years and millions of dollars investigating their supply chains to figure out which components might contain gold, tin, tungsten and tantalum from mining operations blamed for funding armed militia groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The vast majority said they also couldn't be certain, but a dozen companies, includingGoogle Inc., J. Crew Group Inc. and Deere & Co., acknowledged their suppliers may have obtained metals from such mines.
"The Commerce Department is trying to bring clarity to the rule, but as with everything else on this issue, only sows more confusion and deprives businesses of certainty," said Tom Quaadman, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness. "At the end of the day, the conflict minerals rule creates the worst outcome—it has not helped lessen the conflicts in the Congo and creates economic harm in the U.S."
Only about 100 smelters have been certified as conflict-free by the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition, which has been tracking suppliers for some 200 technology firms since 2008.
"It's been a massive effort," said Julie Schindall, communications director for the trade group. "This whole exercise in mapping the smelters has revealed a lack of knowledge about the metals refining industry."
Gold purchased through the Shanghai Gold Exchange, which includes about 15% to 20% of all gold sold world-wide, is also "untraceable," the Commerce Department said, since the SGE doesn't keep records of where its gold is sourced.