WSJ

Multinational corporations have a lot to like in both the House and Senate tax-overhaul proposals. Depending on a company’s structure and operations, there could be a lot to worry about as well.

Median pay for chief executives of the biggest U.S. companies slipped 4.6% last year, but the link between annual compensation and shareholder returns remained weak.

Director pay has received scant attention over the years as investors, regulators and the public have focused on soaring executive compensation. 

Buried deep in American companies’ securities filings is an indicator for how aggressively they are working to shield their income from the Internal Revenue Service and other tax authorities.

The best thing about an employee-stock-ownership plan is that it gives workers a stake in their company's future. Which is also, of course, the worst thing about it.

At a time when Enron Corp. was cutting back on its employee retirement plans to save money, executive benefits at the energy company kept getting richer.

Enron's bankruptcy may have wiped out most of the retirement savings of most of its workers. But one thing it didn't take away were the pensions of its most senior executives. Financial filings disclose that former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, for one, used a private partnership to protect millions of dollars worth of executive pension benefits.

Rosel Patton, a 49-year-old switch engineer in Marlboro, Mass., doesn't realize it, but when she saves for retirement by contributing to her 401(k), she's also helping her company save money.

Until recently, executive deferred-compensation plans largely escaped scrutiny by regulators. That changed after Enron Corp. filed for bankruptcy late last year, and court documents showed that some Enron executives had withdrawn millions of dollars from their accounts just before the Chapter 11 filing.

At a time when scores of companies are freezing pensions for their workers, some are quietly converting their pension plans into resources to finance their executives' retirement benefits and pay.