Along with my anxieties about climate change, economic meltdown and germs that enjoy snacking on antibiotics, I’m now worried that executive perquisites may be endangered.
For the last couple of years, corporate proxy statements have been overflowing with extravagant chief executive officer perks.
For instance, last week’s column flagged the $15,000 per month Travelers spent during 2007 to chauffeur CEO Jay Fishman around on his personal errands.
This is the kind of discovery that helps a blogger get through the day, a small reward for snoring one’s way through piles of Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
Bad On Paper
But now that proxy statements must explain perks in excruciating detail, companies are realizing how goofy these items look on paper, not to mention how much journalists like writing about them.
And quite a few firms, including Bristol Myers Squibb, are rethinking perk policies.
Bristol (per its last proxy) has gone to extremes, eliminating perks altogether beginning in 2008.
What a shame, because these guys were really on a roll.
In the first seven months of 2007, CEO James M. Cornelius racked up nearly $85,000 worth of personal air travel on company planes, and also got $19,000 in cash to help him pay taxes on that benefit.
Now he’ll be dipping into his own pocket to cover personal jet travel.
Fortunately, he has something to work with, having been paid a total of $11 million last year.
Rent Deal
In addition, Cornelius recently had the opportunity to save up some extra dough.
From late 2006 through late 2007, while he scouted out places to live in New York, Bristol picked up his rent at a cost of $25,000 per month, plus utilities.
I guess Bristol executives will learn to manage without company-paid financial planning or tax preparation.
Company cars are out too, except that Cornelius still has a car and driver for security reasons, to protect him from “criminal groups and militant activists.” (I wonder which category we bloggers fall into.)
In a final flourish, the company even got rid of its season tickets to “cultural and sporting events.”
What? No more free skybox seats for corporate bigwigs?
This is the sort of thing, you see, that keeps me up at night.
Wendy Fried, a freelance writer, is a contributing editor at footnoted.org and also blogs about matters corporate at her own site, proxyland.blogspot.com.
