How much does they really make?

Have you ever wondered what the top 500 public corporation's executives are earning in salary, bonuses and other compensation. This is information is now easily available to anyone who wants to visit the Securities and Exchange website at  the SEC's website.

A useful demonstration project...

This is part of the SEC's information availability initiative based on a web technology known as XBRL ( eXtensible Business Reporting Language) which allows corporations to file their financial reports with embedded tags to further identify assets, liabilities, executive compensation and other information which was previously next-to-impossible to dig out manually. Not only with this allow for the comparison of a large number of companies for the purposes of stock screening, but financial research of all types will be greatly facilitated. And considering that many accounting packages are already embedding these tags in their financial data, the situation seems like the class win-win for all people who use or research financial data.

The only losers will be those companies trying to hide important details in their footnotes or otherwise attempting to obfuscate their reported results.

It is anticipated that other government agencies, such as the IRS, will eventually come on board and make tax returns XBRL compatible.

From the SEC...

"This interactive tool is designed to illustrate some of the ways that interactive data can improve the quality and usability of executive compensation disclosure. It relies on interactive data tags that were applied by the Commission to the summary executive compensation disclosure in the public filings of 500 large companies for 2006."

Of course, there are the traditional caveats... 

"Additional materials that explain a company's executive compensation, such as footnotes to the Summary Compensation Table and the Compensation Discussion and Analysis, are included in the company's proxy statement. You should review the entire executive compensation disclosure in the proxy statement to fully understand a company's compensation disclosure. You should not make investment or voting decisions based on the information in this demonstration; you should consult the full filing."

"When data is transcribed as in this demonstration, there is a possibility for transcription error. Although we have taken precautions to minimize any such errors, they could be present. Please alert us to any errors so we can make appropriate corrections."

"Companies remain responsible for the information provided to investors in their Exchange Act reports, but are not responsible for this interactive demonstration."

Entrepreneur Alert...

The source code for an XBRL reader is freely under a non-exclusive license and can be built in to any project you wish.

What can YOU do?

Be extremely pleased that the government has developed something useful and is willing to share it with the public who so graciously paid for the technology.

For the curious, enjoy browsing through the corporate compensation data.

For the investor, check who is receiving top compensation disproportionate to their corporate results -- it might indicate a profitable change in management.

For the entrepreneur, considering building XBRL into your next project or use part of the software tools to enhance a current one.

-- steve

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