by James Parks, Apr 7, 2006

At the same time the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is pushing for more transparency about CEOs’ pay, corporate chieftains are trying to shut the door on financial disclosures already in the books.

At the urging of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, an SEC advisory panel recommended in December to exempt 80 percent of public companies from requirements that their financial statement and internal controls be certified by outside accountants. The independent certifications are required by the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law, which was enacted after the collapse of Enron and WorldCom.

One of the biggest backers of the exemption is the Business Roundtable, chaired by Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell. Under McKinnell, the Roundtable also is fighting the compensation disclosure rules and is a major backer of efforts to privatize Social Security.

It’s in McKinnell’s self-interest to fight compensation disclosure. According to the AFL-CIO’s 2006 Executive PayWatch, McKinnell tops the list of CEO pensions with an expected annual pension benefit of $6.52 million at age 65. Should McKinnell decide to take a lump-sum payment instead of an annual pension, he will receive more than $83 million in cash—worth nearly twice the amount of shares he held as of Dec. 31. 

The 2006 Executive PayWatch website, released April 6, features case studies of out-of-this-world CEO retirement packages and all-new data on CEO compensation packages. Since the first annual PayWatch site was released in 1997, more than 22 million have used the website to track data on CEO pay and the corporate abuses that cause it to soar.

This year’s PayWatch site also enables users to contact the SEC to urge adoption of new disclosure rules for executive pay packages.

Other kings of the top hat retirement circuit include Exxon Mobile’s Lee Raymond ($6.5 million), AT&T’s Edward Whitacre Jr. ($5.5 million), UnitedHealth Group’s William McGuire ($5.1 million) and The Home Depot’s Robert Nardelli ($3.9 million).

“When it comes to a job and retirement security, there is a double standard and workers are not the ones coming out on top,” said AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka.  “Corporate CEOs have been able to rig the rules of the game in their favor and leave workers and their families on the sidelines.”

In 2005, the average CEO of a Standard & Poor’s 500 company received $11.75 million in total compensation, a 3.66 percent increase from 2004. As PayWatch points out, there’s little if any connection between CEO pay and CEO performance. McKinnell, for example, has presided over a nearly 45 percent drop in Pfizer’s stock price over the past six years.

PayWatch’s database of 1,500 CEO pay low-downs is searchable by company name, ticker symbol, industry or total compensation. Here’s a fun feature: Compare your pay to the CEO’s and find out how many hundreds of years it would take you to make that much. Or find out how many thousands of workers could get health or retirement coverage for what the company pays your favorite CEO each year.

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