Two small Dutch peace and development groups, X-Y Beweging and Sjaloom, paid the first researcher's salary. The premise was modest and a little radical for its time. The activities of multinational corporations had real consequences for ordinary people - in Chile, in the Netherlands, in any country where decisions made in a glass tower could close a factory or prop up a regime - and almost nobody outside the corporations themselves was reading the documents that would reveal those consequences. SOMO would. The early reports were photocopied and stapled and circulated through trade union networks. The methodology, which would become the organization's signature, was unglamorous: company filings, supply-chain charts, financial disclosures, sectoral analysis. No leaks, no spectacle - just the public record, read carefully.

By 1975 SOMO had turned its attention from foreign coups to the Dutch shop floor. When a multinational planned a merger or a restructuring, the works council usually faced a wall of consultants from the company's side and almost no expertise on its own. SOMO began producing company profiles - who owned what, where the parent was based, what the global cash flows looked like - and training works council members to read them. Through the 1980s and 1990s, as European Works Councils took shape across the continent, SOMO drafted profiles of nearly every major multinational headquartered in the Netherlands. A union representative sitting across from a CEO suddenly had answers to questions the CEO had assumed nobody would ask.

The internet changed what investigative research could mean. By the late 1990s SOMO's work was less about uncovering secret documents and more about connecting public ones - tracing a t-shirt sold in Rotterdam back through a factory in Bangladesh, a fabric mill in India, a cotton field in Uzbekistan. Sectoral research became the core method: electronics, garments, pharmaceuticals, energy and water, food and agriculture, minerals, finance. SOMO helped launch GoodElectronics to track labor abuses in consumer tech supply chains, makeITfair on conflict minerals, OECD Watch to push the corporate accountability mechanism most companies hoped no one would use. The organization became, in effect, a clearinghouse - a place where activists in the global South could find the research they needed about the European companies operating in their backyards.

Some of SOMO's most consequential work has been about an invisible subject: tax. The Netherlands is a hub for corporate structures designed to route profits through low-tax jurisdictions, and for years few Dutch citizens understood the scale of it. SOMO's researchers helped make that visible, mapping the legal architectures behind names like the Dutch Sandwich, joining the Tax Justice Network, training journalists to read shell-company filings. Their reports have informed Dutch parliamentary inquiries and European Commission regulations. In more recent years the work has expanded into climate justice, big-tech accountability, and pharmaceutical pricing - new arenas, the same method. Look at the corporate structure. Trace the flows. Name what is happening.

SOMO operates from offices in Amsterdam as a foundation, a stichting under Dutch law, governed by a small board and funded by a patchwork of subsidies and commissioned research. Staff numbers in the dozens, not hundreds. There are no spies and no stings. The work is, day to day, almost dull: read the annual report, cross-reference the subsidiary list, ask the unanswered question. The organization's argument, over fifty years now, has been that this is enough - that careful, public, footnoted research, placed in the hands of unions and NGOs and journalists, is how unaccountable power becomes accountable. It is not a fast process. SOMO has the patience for it.