The Scoop
The Trump administration is laying the groundwork to roll back rules that require companies to disclose executive use of private jets and bodyguards. The focus of a Securities and Exchange Commission roundtable set for later this month — invitees still TBD — is changing rules on what companies have to tell shareholders about CEO perks, people briefed on its agenda said. The SEC declined to comment.
Perks are rounding errors, but growing more quickly than total CEO pay. Blame the pandemic: Companies footed the bill for private jets and remote work setups, and once extended, perks are hard to revoke. Spending on bodyguards is likely to increase after the murder of an insurance executive last year. Disclosure rules around them have long annoyed companies. The SEC’s definition of these benefits is anything not “integrally and directly related” to the job, and the agency has sued at least 20 companies since 2015 for hiding the cost of them from shareholders.
Boeing last year admitted that it hadn’t disclosed $500,000 of private-jet use by then-CEO Dave Calhoun, who had used corporate planes to get to and from his vacation homes. Just after that happened, Salesforce began disclosing CEO Marc Benioff’s use of a corporate plane to travel between the company’s San Francisco headquarters and his home in Hawaii, deeming some of those flights “to be in the nature of commuting.”