Pay and Perks Creep Up for Private-College Presidents Some of the highest paid get cash to cover taxes, too

Jack Stripling:

While this statement is surely sometimes true, it is also true that some of the nation's top-paid presidents continue to receive perks that their corporate counterparts have relinquished under shareholder criticism.

Among the 50 highest-paid private-college presidents in 2010, half led institutions that provided top executives with cash to cover taxes on bonuses and other benefits, a Chronicle analysis has found. This practice, known as "grossing up," has fallen out of fashion at many publicly traded companies, where boards have decided the perk is simply not worth the shareholder outrage it can invite.

"Those arrangements became radioactive over the last 10 years," said Mark A. Borges, an expert on executive pay and a principal at Compensia, a consulting company.

Regardless of the amount of money involved, people typically recoil when they learn that an organization's wealthiest employees are given help covering taxes, Mr. Borges said. In the throes of a national debate about tax fairness, those kinds of payments reinforce the perception that the well-off play by a different set of rules. They also point toward the significant bargaining power that presidents have in contract negotiations.

"The whole issue of paying people's taxes on their behalf grates on people," Mr. Borges said.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 11, 2012 2:39 AM
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