Executive pay and corporate governance, one company at a time, every number traceable to a public regulatory disclosure.

What the desk does

Most coverage of executive pay works from the one summary table and stops. That table is the least interesting thing a company files about pay.

The interesting parts are elsewhere and are also disclosed: the peer group a compensation committee selected for itself, the performance targets it chose not to publish, the grant that arrived out of cycle at several times the usual size, and the distance between what a pay plan was built to reward and what happened to the company.

We read all of it, structure it, and check it against itself. Then we publish one company at a time.

The evidence standard

• Every assertion about a named company or executive reduces to a public regulatory disclosure, cited by accession number, in the item itself. Not in an appendix.
• If we cannot cite it, we do not print it.
• Adjectives describe pay designs, never people.
• Nothing here is commentary on securities. This is data journalism about how companies pay people, and about what their investors did about it.
• Commercial customers cannot buy, delay, or preview coverage. That sentence is in print from the first day so the first person who asks finds it already written.

The full methodology

AI, disclosed

The Pay Desk is AI-assisted and human-edited, and says so on every account it runs.

Extraction, anomaly detection, and first drafts are machine work. Publication is not. Every number a model writes is reconciled against the underlying structured record before a person sees it, and a draft whose numbers do not reconcile is rejected rather than edited into shape. Nothing reaches a reader without a human approving it.

The receipts are the point. Open the accession and check us.

Corrections

Corrected within 48 hours, at the top of the feed, and archived permanently. The corrections page