CEO pay rises more slowly but still towers over yours

NEW YORK — More companies are listening to investors' criticism that they overpay chief executives, but that doesn't mean businesses have fixed the problem.

CEO pay continued to climb in 2005, although not nearly as rapidly as in recent years, new surveys show. The median pay to CEOs rose 11.3 percent, according to a survey of more than 550 companies by The Corporate Library, a governance firm.

For CEOs at the largest firms, however, pay rose 3.7 percent to a median $5.2 million.

But the size of the typical CEO's raise varied greatly by which companies were counted, and overall figures obscure wide variations in pay. A closer look at individual companies shows that more than one in four granted their CEOs raises of at least 25 percent, according to a survey of nearly 200 large firms by compensation analyst Equilar.

The newest raises for top executives mean the pay of the average CEO at a Standard & Poor's 500 firm is now 430 times that of the average U.S. worker — more than 10 times what it was in 1980, according to the AFL-CIO.

Once again, the largest payouts went to chief executives cashing in huge numbers of stock options.

Tops on that list was Richard Fairbank, the chairman and CEO of credit-card issuer Capital One.

Fairbank, who earned no salary or bonus, was paid almost entirely in a grant of new options this year, valued at just over $18 million.

That paled, however, with the $249.3 million Fairbank earned last year by exercising previously issued options.

In the past few years, many companies have cut back on the number of options they issue, moving to restricted stock and long-term incentive payouts.

The days of huge options payouts are hardly over, however. More than 80 percent of large companies still include options in CEO compensation.

And even as more companies make changes to link CEO pay to executives' proven ability to deliver results over time, serious disconnects remain, experts say.

"I think some of the companies are trying to improve the situation," said Paul Hodgson, a compensation expert for The Corporate Library. "To be honest, if I can figure it out, I don't see why people who are leading some of the largest companies in the country shouldn't be able to figure it out as well."

The slow pace of change means some companies continue to pay CEOs far out of proportion to the results they deliver to shareholders, experts say.

For example, AT&T — until recently known as SBC Communications — paid CEO Edward Whitacre $17.1 million last year, a 15 percent increase. That raise brought his total pay over the past five years to more than $85 million, despite the fact shareholder return — the potential gain to investors who own its stock — is down 40 percent over that period, according to analysis by Hodgson's firm.

Major companies that awarded their CEOs pay raises of 25 to 50 percent averaged total shareholder return of 7.4 percent, according to Equilar.

Companies that gave their top executives raises of more than 50 percent averaged total shareholder return of 11.1 percent, according to the analysis of the pay packages at 197 large firms.

Increasingly, however, such disconnects are the anomaly, compensation experts say.

Most firms have moved past the era of huge raises for top executives even as profits and stock price dropped, said Patrick McGurn, executive vice president of Institutional Shareholder Services.

But companies are still in the infancy of efforts to reform pay. They have yet to assure that CEO paychecks directly — and not just directionally — reflect how top executives perform compared with those at rival firms, McGurn said.

Investor irritation over excessive pay is not dissipating despite the rebound in the stock market and the ebbing of corporate scandals. Nine of 10 institutional investors surveyed recently by consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide said U.S. companies rely on methods that dramatically overpay executives.

Nearly as many say those practices have damaged corporate America's image.

U.S. investors singled out executive compensation as their top concern over the next three years, according to another survey by ISS being released this week.

"We've had three years of shareholder gains and yet this [CEO pay] is still a headline," said Tim Ranzetta, president and chief operating officer of Equilar. "Shareholders are still focusing on the issue."

Given those concerns, investors will continue to find much in this year's CEO pay packages to raise eyebrows.

Some of the largest checks went to the top executives at energy and home-building firms, even though their companies' surging profits arguably had more to do with the economy and marketplace than with CEO strategizing or leadership, experts say.

"The question is, have you simply allowed your ship to rise along with a rising tide, and it's not the value actually provided," McGurn said. "Certainly the builders and the energy companies would seem to fit that."

For example, Occidental Petroleum awarded Ray Irani, its chairman, president and CEO, restricted stock valued at $30.9 million and long-term incentive payouts valued at $10.6 million.

CEOs at Wall Street firms also prospered. The package Lehman Bros. paid to Richard Fuld Jr., its chairman and CEO, was valued at $34.5 million.

While companies have been slow to rein in pay, some are more upfront about the way they compensate their CEOs. Such detail will be required beginning next year, when new rules are to take effect, requiring more disclosure of executive-pay packages.

For example, nanomanufacturing technology firm Applied Materials included a table in its proxy statement with a column showing total compensation paid to its top executives. Last year, the tally shows, the company paid Michael Splinter, its president and CEO, a total $6.4 million, down from the $17.6 million it paid the previous year, reflecting a much smaller bonus.

It might seem obvious for a company to provide such a total. But companies have routinely avoided doing so, leaving it to investors to determine the full value of pay packages.

"If we're going to see better performance in the future," said McGurn of ISS, "I think it's always going to be because shareholders took the new information they were provided with and actually did something with it."