Press Room

"Companies in the Fix the Debt coalition, which advocates for federal austerity policies, qualified for $1 billion or more in tax breaks tied to executive pay packages from 2009 to 2011, according to a new report by the liberal think tanks Institute for Policy Studies and Campaign for America's Future.

"The four highest-paid executives at the firms received a total of $6.3 billion in pay over the period, according to the report. Federal tax law allows companies to deduct executive pay based on performance from the firm's tax bill as a business expense. This performance-based compensation includes stock options, stock awards and other types of incentive pay. These 90 companies qualified for tax perks totaling between $1 billion and $1.5 billion over the course of three years, depending on how many types of pay firms actually deducted."

"Corporations backing a broad deal to reduce deficits have racked up millions of dollars of savings from the tax treatment of executive compensation, according to a new study from liberal groups.

"The study found that the 88 of the 90 publicly-held companies aligned with the Campaign Fix the Debt used an took advantage of an incentive for performance-based payments like stock options.

"For around two decades now, corporations have only been able to write off up to $1 million of executive pay – but, as the Institute for Policy Studies and the Campaign for America’s Future note, that limit does not apply to performance-related compensation.

"In all, corporations in Fix the Debt were able to save anywhere from $953 million to $1.6 billion between 2009 and 2011 because of the tax treatment of performance-based pay, the study says."

"Fix The Debt, the group pushing Congress to do something about runaway deficit spending, is loaded with highly compensated CEOs who know more about prosperity than austerity.

"They want to close tax loopholes, but they haven't yet mentioned that part of the tax code that encourages their companies to pay them millions in performance-based pay each year.

"'Before they start calling for cuts that will have a huge impact on ordinary Americans, they should look at the ways they've been contributing to the deficit,' said Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.

"Anderson is one of the authors of a study that her group released Thursday called, 'Fix The Debt CEOs Enjoy Taxpayer-Subsidized Pay.'"

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies and Campaign for America’s Future finds that 90 member firms took in somewhere between $953 million and $1.6 billion through the ability to deduct performance pay from corporate taxes between 2009 and 2011. The report includes the biggest winners of this loophole.

Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, says that a growing push for war in Syria should remind U.S. citizens of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was was largely fueled by an uncritical press and a barrage of false information by some of the same power brokers now pushing for intervention in Syria.

"Now, we don't know that there is any fake information going on [in Syria]," Bennis said in an interview with Al-Jazeera. "But we certainly know that there is no valid information yet. So I think it is way premature to be talking about whether this should result in a 'game changing' scenario -- whether it be boots on the ground, or helping the rebels with more weapons."

Two important progressive organizations, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Campaign for America's Future, today jointly released Fix the Debt" CEOs Enjoy Taxpayer-Subsidized Pay . . . 

The report is the first to put a price tag on the tax breaks specific corporations have enjoyed from a loophole that allows unlimited deductions for executive stock options and other “performance-based” pay.

I am not going to quote more from either the summary or the report itself.   You should read the report.

Instead I want to offer a few remarks about the implications of this practice.

-  executives are being rewarded even if their actions do not benefit the shareholders . . .

- for all their bloviating about how we can't "afford" the social safety-net programs such as Social Security and Medicare -  into which we have been paying based on a supposed commitment of benefits - none of these people have to worry about the impact of cutting benefits whether by using chained-CPI or by raising age for eligibility.

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies and Campaign for America's Future shows that the CEOs who run the 90 corporations in the '"Fix the Debt" coalition, which advocates for cuts to earned benefits like Social Security while reducing tax rates for, well, themselves, accept massive subsidies from the U.S. government. The amount they have taken in subsidies ranges from a possible low of $953 million to a possible high of $1.6 billion.

"The performance pay loophole serves as a critical subsidy for excessive compensation," says the report. "The larger the executive payout, the less the corporation pays in taxes. And average taxpayers wind up footing the bill."

According to the study:

During the three-year period 2009-2011, the 90 publicly held corporate members of the austerity-focused “Fix the Debt” lobby group shoveled out $6.3 billion in pay to their CEOs and next three highest-paid executives.

These 90 Fix the Debt member firms raked in at least $953 million — and as much as $1.6 billion — from the “performance pay” loophole between 2009-2011. The exact full value of corporate windfalls from this loophole will remain impossible to compute until we have more complete mandated disclosure for executive compensation.