SEC chides 350 companies for executive pay disclosures

Looking to get more information for investors about how companies calculate their executive pay packages, the SEC sent 350 letters to companies last summer asking them questions about how they paid executives.

But according to (subscription required) The Wall Street Journal, "A majority of the companies have now received second letters, according to an SEC official, and of 26 companies whose cases were closed, 21 were chided for not giving enough information about the role of individual performance in their pay decisions."

I certainly applaud the SEC for trying to get more meaningful disclosure for us but, sadly, none of it will matter unless big institutional shareholders decide to step up to the plate.

It's a pretty well-known fact that compensation consultants are a joke. It's hard to imagine any metric that gives CEOs raises and eight-figure paydays while their share prices tank and their companies bleed red ink. But that happens all the time.

More disclosure is great and should help to expose just how terrible compensation practices are at so many public companies. Maybe, just maybe, it will embarrass some companies into reforming how they calculate executive pay.

But with institutional investors and pension fund managers who, with notable exceptions, sit on their hands while executives like Angelo Mozilo reap hundreds of millions in compensation as their companies sink to the brink of bankruptcy, not much is going to change.