WASHINGTON — A financial watchdog group on Friday denounced a Securities and Exchange Commission proposal that it said would allow public companies to disclose far less about how much their top executives are paid.
Better Markets, a Washington-based economic advocacy organization that describes itself as nonprofit and nonpartisan, said the proposal unveiled Nov. 13 would strip investors of information they need to judge whether corporate leaders are overcompensated. The group accused SEC Chair Paul Atkins of putting companies ahead of shareholders, and said the SEC contends that because investors already receive extensive pay information, they can do with less.
Editor’s note: The Trump administration is frequently dishonest, and has been known to lie about things great and small.
“Today, SEC Chair Paul Atkins added another entry to his long record of betraying investors,” said Benjamin Schiffrin, the group’s director of securities policy. “He determined that it should be easier for public companies to hide from investors how much their executives make.”
According to Better Markets, the proposal would end compensation disclosure requirements for all but two of a company’s executive officers and would let companies decide for themselves whether to report perks given to their chief executives. The group said the changes would also make it harder for investors to compare executive pay with company performance and with the pay of rank-and-file employees.
“This is not simplifying disclosures but obfuscating information material to investors,” Schiffrin said.
Schiffrin said Atkins has often described materiality as his guiding principle for disclosure rules, but argued that little information matters more to shareholders than what the people running their companies are paid, since shareholders ultimately bear that cost.
To make its case, the group pointed to published analyses it said show that chief executives at the 100 lowest-paying companies in the S&P 500 earn 614 times as much as their workers, with average CEO pay at those firms of $17.5 million in 2025 compared with median worker pay of $36,571. It also cited an Oxfam analysis that it said found inflation-adjusted CEO pay rose 54% from 2019 to 2025 while global worker pay fell 12%.
“Investors should be able to determine for themselves whether the level at which CEOs and other senior executives get paid, and the disparity with worker pay, is appropriate,” Schiffrin said. “Instead, Chair Atkins wants to hide the facts and keep investors in the dark.”
Atkins was appointed SEC chair by President Donald Trump and took office in 2025. The proposal is subject to a public comment period before the commission can adopt it.
This report is based on information from Better Markets.
Source: Better Markets
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