Relative benchmarking is near-universal as companies assess historical pay-for-performance (P4P) alignment, but should relative performance be an explicit incentive plan measure? Most companies provide the majority of their long-term incentive (LTI) award opportunity to senior executives in equity-based awards, which has an underlying value directly aligned to stock price fluctuations.

Corporate governance, in its current application in the business community, refers to a framework of policies, rules, and practices that is overseen by a company's Board of Directors, for managing a company's relationships with its stakeholders. Stakeholders refers to a broad group, including all shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers, and the community.

Directors face many challenges when serving on a public company's Board of Directors Compensation Committee.

Corporate share buybacks (also known as repurchases) have been somewhat controversial for many years, but have taken on even greater significance following the corporate tax cuts passed in 2017 and implemented in 2018. It is estimated that buybacks reached $1 trillion in 2018, likely fueled by extra cash resulting from the tax cuts. Buybacks are also gaining attention across a broader cross-section of the political arena, as three U.S. Senators and an SEC Commissioner have recently criticized share buybacks, with each commentary citing different criticism and potential solutions.

CEO pay continues to be an extensively discussed topic in the media, in the boardroom, and among investors and proxy advisors. CEO total direct compensation (TDC; base salary + actual bonus paid + grant value of long-term incentives [LTI]) has increased at a moderate pace in recent years " in the 2-6% range for 2011-2016. However, CEO pay accelerated in 2017 at an 11% increase, likely reflecting sustained robust financial and total shareholder return (TSR) performance. Our CEO pay analysis is focused on historical actual TDC, which reflects actual bonuses; this is different from target TDC or target pay opportunity, which uses target bonus and is typically set at the beginning of the year.

During the last week of September 2018, Governor Jerry Brown signed a law mandating public companies headquartered in California must have at least one female member on their board of directors by December 31, 2019. Further, companies with less than six members on the board will be required to have at least two female directors by the end of 2021, and companies with six or more directors will be required to have at least three female directors by the end of 2021. The legislation, referred to as SB-826, is in direct response to legislators and regulators who have found women to be underrepresented on public company boards. The Board of Governance Research LLC, in a 2017 study of Russell 3000 companies headquartered in California, found that more than 25 percent of the 441 reported companies had no female directors.

In 2004, the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) Division of Investment Management issued letters to two proxy advisory firms, Egan-Jones Proxy Services and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), that assured mutual fund managers they could rely on the vote recommendations of the two firms. On September 13, 2018, the SEC Investment Management staff decided to rescind the two letters.

Section 162(m) was added to the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) in 1994 in what was seen as a reaction to escalating executive pay. Commonly referred to as the "$1 million pay cap," Section 162(m) denied subject companies the corporate tax deduction for compensation paid to the CEO (referred to as the Principal Executive Officer or PEO) and other proxy-named executive officers (NEOs) that exceeded the $1 million statutory limitation. Exceptions to the amount of covered compensation pursuant to Section 162(m) were permitted if such compensation was deemed "performance-based" under shareholder-approved plans.

On August 15, 2018, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts introduced proposed legislation, the Accountable Capitalism Act, in the U.S. Senate. The legislation would require all U.S. corporations with $1 billion or more in annual revenues to obtain a federal charter as a "United States corporation" and would obligate corporate directors to consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders in their corporate governance activities.