It looks like Securities Mosaic, a research firm, has been having a little fun with the Securities and Exchange Commission's new XBRL executive pay viewer. With "interactive data" making it easy to sift through filings to see what top executives are making, they used the 2006 numbers to create top-10 lists of the best-paid CFOs and CEOs. The sums are hefty, but taken together this might be one of the rare times that CFOs appear underpaid.
Merrill Lynch's executives topped both lists with since-departed CEO Stanley Neal raking in $91,375,384 and CFO Jeffrey Edwards earning $28,251,601. And while it's harder to compare across different companies, the income gap was even wider between the CEO and CFO in the number two spots, with Thomas Freston, the former CEO of Viacom, earning $89,302,968 in 2006 compared to Stephen Chazen, CFO of Occidental Petroleum, who pulled in $19,822,389 during the same year.
In third place on the list, Yahoo! CFO Susan Decker ($15,959,723 in 2006) did a better job of closing the gap with her CEO, Terry Semel, who placed ninth among CEOs with $39,824,639. Then again, Semel has since become a non-executive chairman, and Decker is now president of the company, so perhaps the comparison doesn't hold.
The full lists are here. |
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