In a victory for transparency, the ARRA data on Recovery.gov now has names–the names, that is, of the highest paid officers at companies that received Recovery Act contracts directly from the federal government.
As I
wrote
about a couple of week ago, the federal rules governing ARRA contracts require certain companies to divulge pay information for their five highest-paid people. These are firms that receive $25 million or more in federal governments as long as federal contracts account for 80 percent or more of their total revenue.
When the first versions of the contractor recipient reports were released on October 15, the compensation figures were there but the names were absent. The Recovery Board, which oversees Recovery.gov, was concerned that disclosing the names might be a violation of privacy. Good Jobs First raised this issue in a meeting that we and OMB Watch and the Economic Policy Institute had with Recovery Board Chair Earl Devaney and his top staff. We were told the matter was under consideration.
It appears that transparency won out over privacy. The revised contractor data released last week (along with the new grants and loan data) now includes the names of the executives along with their pay. The spreadsheet also cleans up some glitches that had put the compensation data in incorrect fields.
There are now about two dozen firms reporting total compensation of $1 million or more. The largest is Lockheed Martin Services, which reports that Robert Stevens (CEO of Lockheed Martin) was paid $26.5 million. This is one of numerous examples in which an ARRA contractor affiliated with a publicly traded company reported the compensation of the top executives of its parent company–information that is already disclosed in SEC filings and may not technically be required in the ARRA report.
Yet there are also cases in which privately held companies appear to be disclosing the pay of their top people for the first time. The largest of these amounts comes from consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which reports that its CEO Ralph Shrader was paid $8.4 million.
Since it is not obvious how to find this data, here are some instructions:
-
Go to the
Download Center
on Recovery.gov and under the Recipient Reporting tab, choose the XLS version of the file named All_ContractsFY09Q4. - Unzip and open the file in Excel.
- Sort the spreadsheet by the field called recipient_officer_totalcomp1 (largest to smallest).
- Scroll across to Column S (recipient name)
- Freeze that column and then scroll across to Column AZ (recipient_officer_1)
- This shows the name of the highest paid officer. The total compensation amount for that person is in Column BE.
- The name of the second highest paid officer is in Column BA and the amount is in Column BF.
- Third highest: BB and BG. Fourth: BC and BH. And fifth: BD and BI.
Reposted from the
STAR Coalition website
.