Investors Click Through to Salary Information With New Tool

SEC website visitors can compare executive compensations with help of new computer language coding 

By James Hyatt 

Wondering who’s on first?

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has launched an online tool letting investors easily compare salaries of top executives at 500 of the nation’s largest companies.

The Executive Compensation Reader—available at the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov/xbrl —builds on the commission's new requirements that executive compensation figures filed with the agency be tagged with special computer language coding.

“Gone are the complicated data expeditions that forced investors to hunt through financial statements, footnotes, proxy statements and other disclosure documents to figure out how much a company pays its top executives,” SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said.

Investors can quickly glimpse the total annual pay as well as dollar amounts for salary, bonus, stock options and company perks. They can instantly compare those executive compensation figures with other companies by sorting according to industry or size, the SEC said.

A spokesman said there are not any plans at the moment to expand the feature beyond the 500 large companies.

A number of mutual funds, at the SEC’s urging, also have begun filing risk/return information using the special coding, which soon will permit other types of comparisons via the SEC website.