New Report Finds How Much Tax Payers Have Subsidized CEO Bonuses

FEATURING SARAH ANDERSON – Wall Street companies justify paying their executives exorbitant amounts of money by saying that’s how you attract top talent. But the performance pay idea is a myth, according to a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies.

The report called The Wall Street CEO Bonus Loophole, which is the first of its kind, has found that in recent years top financial firms have paid obscene bonuses to its CEOs, in a manner that has little correlation with performance. Worse, the bonuses are tax deductible, which means that ordinary Americans have had to pay the difference in lost tax revenues. In effect, we are all subsidizing the massive multi-million dollar bonus paychecks and stock options for some of the wealthiest Americans.

The IPS report gives one example that might infuriate you: “Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf received the largest amount of such bonuses. Between 2012 and 2015, years in which his bank faced $10.4 billion in misconduct penalties, Wells Fargo received  $54 million in tax subsidies — just for one man’s bonuses.”

Find more at www.ips-dc.org or download the report HERE.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy project at the Institute for Policy Studies and is one of the authors of the report, The Wall Street CEO Bonus Loophole. She has also co-authored the 22 previous IPS annual Executive Excess reports.