June 20, 2019 Executive Compensation Shareholder Voting, SOP, and Proxy Results Reports

2019 Say on Pay Report Director election support continues to decline from prior year levels

At the beginning of the 2019 proxy season, we predicted that 2019 average Say on Pay support for Russell 3000 companies would fall below the 2018 average and the failure rate would reach 3.0% for the first time. Thus far, the average vote result (90.8%) is 60 basis points higher than 2018 year-end average and the 2.4% failure rate is lower than our 3.0% prediction.

We also predicted that 20% of Russell 3000 companies would enhance CEO Pay Ratio disclosure in 2019 by electing to disclose an alternate Pay Ratio. Only 10% of companies have elected to do so thus far ” most commonly to illustrate the impact of one-time CEO awards, using only U.S. employees, or using only full-time or corporate employees. Meanwhile, average vote support in Director elections has declined to a five year low of 95.3% and is just 30 basis points above our prediction that average support would fall below 95.0% by the end of the year.

Contributors

Todd Sirras

Austin Vanbastelaer

Justin Beck

Related Insights