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News & Analysis | REG•WATCH Blog | Press Room
Friday, December 09, 2005
Bush Administration Actually Does Something for Public?
Could it be? The administration might be ready to do something to protect the public? Here's a report from Congress Daily:
SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said the agency will propose regulations to crack down on hidden executive pay as early as next month, Bloomberg News reported. The SEC is drafting rules that would require companies to put salary, bonus, stock and option awards, and all benefits into a single figure. Cox plans to have the regulations ready "shortly" after Jan. 1. "Today's regulatory regime permits obfuscation or worse when it comes to executive compensation," Cox said in an e-mailed statement. "The notorious abuses, such as never-before-disclosed exit payments, are the byproduct of this leaky regime." The SEC's current rule on compensation disclosure is 13 years old. It allows U.S. companies to scatter details of executive compensation in different parts of the proxy statements that they distribute to shareholders.
Given the decline of pensions, many regular Americans now have their retirement savings in the stock market through IRAs and 401(k)s. Those same ordinary Americans have witnessed their salaries and wages decrease with the outsourcing of valuable manufacturing jobs or increase at a much slower rate than the compensation packages given to fatcat CEOs. If this report is accurate, then we may be poised to get better information about where our retirement money is going (and how well CEOs are being paid for exporting American wealth).
Posted by Robert Shull
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