CONTINUING COVERAGE
AJC reporter Russell Grantham is tracking what Georgia’s major public companies pay their top executives. Look for periodic news and trend stories in the weeks ahead, as well as up-to-date statistics, as Grantham pores through this year’s corporate proxy statements.
Equifax Chief Executive Rick Smith got a 20 percent pay increase last year, to $13.4 million, as the credit report company’s shares and financial performance recovered from the 2007-2009 recession.
Another of Georgia’s financial heavyweights, Aflac, said Thursday that it cut CEO Daniel Amos’ pay by nearly 6 percent, to $13.8 million for 2012, as the insurer fell short of performance targets.
At Equifax, Smith’s and other top executives’ pay jumped partly because the Atlanta-based credit-reporting bureau awarded significantly bigger chunks of stock last year that accounted for more than half of their pay.
Joining a trend at other companies, Equifax last year switched about half of those stock awards to so-called “performance shares.” Equifax’s executives can’t keep all of the stock awards unless the company’s shares do better than the overall stock market over the next three years.
If the company beats those targets, Smith’s 2012 stock awards could be worth as much as $11.3 million, Equifax said in a proxy statement filed Wednesday. Using more conservative assumptions, Equifax estimated that Smith’s stock award last year was worth almost $7.1 million, more than double his previous year’s award.
Smith’s 2012 compensation also included $4.5 million in salary and bonus, a $1.8 million increase in the value of the 53-year-old CEO’s pension, and $105,571 in perks.
While Equifax and other giant credit bureaus have been getting a black eye recently amid questions over the accuracy of their credit reports, the company has been doing well financially.
Equifax’s revenues rose 10 percent last year, to $2.2 billion, and profits gained almost 17 percent, to $272 million. Shareholders saw a total return of nearly 42 percent.
A recent federal study of the nation’s major credit reporting agencies concluded that about 5 percent of consumers’ credit reports may have significant errors. About two dozen states, including Georgia, are investigating consumers’ complaints that errors are difficult to correct.
Equifax and the other agencies counter that most consumers have been able to correct errors satisfactorily. Equifax recently said it is streamlining the process to verify and correct credit records.
Meanwhile, Columbus-based Aflac also had strong financial performance in 2012. Profits rose 48 percent last year to almost $2.9 billion and revenues were up 14 percent, to $25.4 billion. Shareholders’ total return was 26 percent, beating the 16 percent gain of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.
Still, according to Aflac’s proxy filed Thursday, that wasn’t enough to save Amos, 61, from taking a pay cut last year based on several multi-year performance measures that lagged targets. Amos’ compensation dropped from $14.6 million in 2011 to $13.8 million in 2012.
His pay last year included $6.5 million in salary and bonus, $4.5 million in stock awards, a $2.6 million increase in the value of his pension, and $252,764 in perks, including security systems, bodyguards and personal use of a company jet.
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