Changes to Section 162(m) Affecting Deferred Compensation Arrangements

Public companies maintaining deferred compensation arrangements for their executive officers should consider how recent changes to the regulations under Section 162(m) of the Internal Revenue Code (the Code) may impact the timing of payments to be made to participants and their beneficiaries under such plans – if action is required, the affected plans must be amended before December 31, 2020 to avoid complications or penalties. READ MORE

Top 10 Questions To Ask About Your Restricted Stock Or RSU Grant

At a public company, you are now much more likely to get a grant of restricted stock or restricted stock units (RSUs) than stock options. That’s true all the way from Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, or Tesla to new IPO companies. Whether you consult a financial advisor or do your own tax and financial planning, you need to understand some core issues with these grants to build wealth and prevent costly mistakes. READ MORE

Thoughts When Linking Public Company Executive Pay to D&I Initiatives

This Post will begin a series of blog entries focused on the topic of linking executive pay to a publicly-traded issuer’s diversity and inclusion (“D&I“) initiatives.  As background, there has been a recent push to hold executives accountable for the effectiveness of an issuer’s D&I initiatives by linking their executive pay to the success of such initiatives.  Pretty straight forward (i.e., the success of the D&I initiative becomes one of the metrics in the issuer’s performance-based compensation strategy). READ MORE

Equity Compensation Complicates Planning During Pandemic

The pandemic has pushed employees who receive company stock options to look for help from advisors, Schwab Stock Plan Services reported Tuesday.

Two-thirds of employees who have recently sold stock options did so because of the pandemic, according to a Schwab survey, which was based on 1,000 individuals receiving stock options. Thirty-nine percent of those surveyed said they were more likely to need financial advice due to the pandemic. READ MORE

Dodging the Analysis Paralysis in Compensation

In order to effectively manage reward programs, compensation practitioners and their senior management leaders need to understand how competitive those programs are. In making that determination, though, just how precise does the analysis have to be?  To what lengths should one go to increase the level of perceived exactitude in the analysis, and is that effort worthwhile?  Does the effort to squeeze out greater precision bring more meaningful results? READ MORE

The Critical Difference Between Compliance-Driven Pay Equity and Compensation Strategy-Focused Pay Equity

Until a few years ago, pay equity analyses were seen mostly as projects driven by lawyers and statisticians to provide protection against lawsuits. In fact, we still work with rewards leaders who previously were left in the dark about the methodology and results of their pay equity analyses. What’s more, legally-driven analytical techniques resemble those applied in actual lawsuits and often cloud the view of what the data is revealing about pay fairness: READ MORE

GAO Report on Top Hat Plans Calls for Stricter Oversight by IRS and DOL

In response to a request by U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (Oregon), Bernie Sanders (Vermont) and Patty Murray (Washington), the Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) earlier this year completed a study and published a report with its findings on executive retirement plans and specifically “top hat” plans. The report examined the prevalence, key advantages and revenue effects of executive retirement plans and how federal oversight protects benefits and prevents ineligible participation. READ MORE

Performance Appraisal & Rewards in Response to COVID-19

Most organizations don’t have a playbook to pull through the ongoing public health crisis. A pandemic of this scale has not emerged in many countries in well over 100 years (i.e. Spanish flu). And the lessons from most recent events in the last 20 years like the relatively mild swine flu (H1N1) in 2009, the dot-com bubble of 2001, and the 2008-09 Great Recession, are nowhere near suitable to withstand the social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Buzzwords such as “agile,” “resilience,” and “flexibility” have become almost banal to describe the grim reality of our daily lives and the decisions we must take, as the full effects of the coronavirus pandemic now unfold. READ MORE