Biz journalist conference call on exec pay held

A panel of expert journalists and a compensation consultant gave more than 100 business reporters useful advice on how to figure out CEO pay, pensions and severance in a training teleconference Wednesday sponsored by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

The 90-minute conference, accompanied by a Web-based presentation of key points and sample securities documents, was timed to coincide with the start of the proxy season. It offered detailed guidance on the SEC’s revised rules for company disclosure of executive compensation, including:

• what’s new this year in how companies are presenting their information on compensation;
• how to analyze a company’s policies on performance and compensation;
• an explanation of The Associated Press’s formula for determining a bottom-line pay figure from the compensation and stock awards tables in a proxy filing, as well as discussion of alternative formulas;
• how to find details on bonuses, stock grants, options and other forms of compensation;
• how to look at severance and pension plan disclosures;
• looking at compensation in terms of what’s granted versus what’s actually pocketed;
• how to distinguish between guaranteed pay and “at riskâ€? pay;
• how benchmarking works in setting, and sometimes inflating, pay levels.

The panelists were AP business columnist Rachel Beck; Rocky Mountain News finance editor David Milstead, and David Wise, an executive pay consultant with Hay Group. Moderating was Dave Kansas, former editor of the Wall Street Journal’s Money & Investing section who now leads the personal finance Web site filife.com.

SABEW will soon be posting an audio file of the conference, along with the slides, on its Web site at http://www.sabew.org/. Also, I have a copy of the AP proxy tutorial if anyone would like to read it. E-mail me at croush@email.unc.edu, and I will send it to you.