Ethics Newsline®

NEW YORK
Enormous payouts for chief executives is an issue increasingly troubling to ethicists, according to a recent analysis from the Reuters news agency.

Soaring executive pay “offends most people’s sense of fairness,” said Archie Carroll, a recently retired business ethics professor at the University of Georgia. It “symbolizes more than anything else how out of touch corporate America, particularly CEOs and boards of directors, is with the rest of American society,” he told Reuters.

Ethicists interviewed by Reuters pointed to the recent departure of Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli, who received a $210 million exit package despite the lackluster stock performance of his company.

His severance package roughly equals the annual salaries of 10,000 retail clerks, according to Reuters.

In related news, the Associated Press reports that publicly held companies whose fiscal years ended on or after December 15 now will have to clearly and explicitly detail executive compensation. Previously, the AP reports, key parts of executives’ pay packages were often buried in footnotes.