Pay Granted, Earned, and Paid: Bubble, Bubble Toil and Trouble?

by Fred Whittlesey
Compensation Venture Group, Inc.

The actual line from Macbeth was, of course, “Double, double toil and trouble.” Factual documented information often gets twisted into a widespread misunderstanding. And so we have executive pay.

For the past twenty or more years the media have reported executive pay as a “story” worth covering. This has escalated over the past few years as the topic has moved from the business section to the front page. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the numbers are bigger. Apparently it’s more interesting to read that someone was paid $210 million than it is to read that someone was paid $10 million. Second, the reason for the pay has changed. $210 million for getting fired versus $10 million for running a successful company does indeed have a human interest angle.

But where do these numbers come from and how do we know they are right? The answers to that compound question are “the proxy statement” and “we don’t.” The SEC’s new proxy disclosure rules changed the Summary Compensation Table (SCT) from a report of apples (dollars earned and paid), oranges (dollars contingently paid), and bananas (stock options granted – the number, not the value) into a recipe for vegetable stew (accounting expense) – which would be alright if we were looking for vegetables, but we were really wanting to know about fruit.

Here is the root of the problem:

Most compensation professionals were trained, and continue to believe, that the amount granted in a single year, regardless of contingencies for future vesting or performance, is “pay” for that year. We do need to value those grants. By way of example, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple was “paid” only $1 (there are no missing zeroes, there, just one dollar) in 2006. He received no bonus, no stock option grants, no stock awards. Just a buck.

The new SCT portrays what the accountants recorded as an accrued (read: estimated or hypothetical) and thus earned expense for the year. Some joke that the SCT now stands for “Summary Cost Table” but it is not that either unless your only view of “cost” is accounting expense and shareholders are move savvy than that. We do need to decide if the accounting numbers are useful in valuing those grants. Under this method, Steve Jobs was paid $1 plus the portion of the $577 million in restricted stock that he “earned” during the 2006 fiscal year. We'll know that number when Apple files their next proxy under the "new rules."

The media, of course, like to report what was paid, even if that represents an accumulated amount based on 10 years of work. Those big numbers sell newspapers. I think we can conclude that these numbers are far removed from any single year’s grants. Under this method, Steve Jobs was paid $577 million in 2006...oops, $577,000,001. We could talk about Mr. Jobs other job, as CEO of Pixar, or his Gulfstream, but we'll leave those for another blog day.

The Jobs/Apple example is extreme enough that it invites more scrutiny. But what about the CEO of one homebuilder whose three numbers for 2006 are $2,015,499 granted, ($2,296,918) earned, and $7,903,997 paid. Negative compensation? That guy must have had a really poor year but fortunately was “paid” almost $8 million in a year in which he “earned” negative $2 million.

This can make one feel like all of this data more witches’ brew than vegetable stew, and impossible to digest. Compensation professionals have never faced such a large amount of such confusing information. I think it is a fair estimate to say that it is at least “double double toil and trouble” to analyze executive pay. Shakespeare saw it coming.

It’s critical that a company and its Compensation Committee take a position on how pay is measured and use that consistently in benchmarking, analysis, and the decision process. An appropriate data collection strategy focused on the most recent data available, combined with attention to details of compensation design, will cut through the confusion and tell the correct story. Data from SEC filings is the most valuable and most accurate data available for executive pay, and it’s worth the toil and trouble.

Next blog: An example of the measurement problem