From Bureau of Labor Statistics Daily Report, 8/29/18
American taxpayers are subsidizing wide gaps in compensation at major U.S. corporations that receive lucrative federal government contracts and subsidies, a new report shows (Kevin McCoy, USA Today, “CEO vs. worker pay: Federal contractors have the biggest compensation gaps”). More than two-thirds of the top 50 publicly held federal contractors and federal corporate subsidy recipients paid their CEOs more than 100 times the median pay of their workers in 2017, according to the analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank focused on equality issues. As a result, high-earning chief executives at many companies with major federal contracts or subsidies in part "owe their personal good fortune to America's taxpayers," the report concluded.
"Taxpayers should not be subsidizing extreme pay gaps in any way, whether through tax, contracting, or subsidy policies," said Sarah Anderson, the report's co-author. The analysis was based on a comparison of federal contract and subsidy awards with pay ratio data that publicly traded companies disclosed this year for the first time under a new federal regulation enacted by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The pay ratio between the $400,000 U.S. presidential salary in 2017 and the $82,406 average annual compensation for federal employees is roughly 5-1. In contrast, the report cited data that showed the 2017 pay ratios for the top 50 corporate federal subsidy recipients was 153-1. Similarly, the ratios for the top 50 corporate recipients of federal contracts was 188-1, the data showed. The largest pay gap among the top 50 federal contractors was the 806-1 ratio reported by DXC Technology, a Virginia-based internet technology services company, the report said.