A number of public companies have made announcements about adjustments to compensation because of the effect of the pandemic on revenues and/or income. In the EC and DC tables that we have seen the adjustments have generally been reflected in the Compensation Discussion and Analysis section of the DEF 14A or the 10-K. However we have had one registrant report the adjustment in the body of a table. Below is an image of the DC table reported in NET 1 UEPS’s proxy (CIK 104514):

Because the adjustment has been so clearly labeled we have decided to include a new column in the DC/EC data when the registrant makes this disclosure. If you download DC data for this company you will see this column in the output.

Interestingly – they did not use the same practice when they prepared their EC table. Rather than reporting the adjustment in the table they described that “The 2020 amounts presented for Messrs. Kotzé, Pillay and Smith are after the agreed COVID-19 salary reduction under which we donated 30% of their fourth quarter base salary to initiatives fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa.” In these cases we are not making any additional disclosure or adjustment to the data.

Interestingly, Rave Restaurant Group (CIK 718332) reported that their directors waived fees for the 3rd and 4th quarter of 2020. Since they provided no direct explanation of the motivation for the waiver we made the tough decision to net the fees waived against OTHER (RAVE DEF 14A).

We are just a month or so before we begin seeing a crush of filings for the 12/31 registrants. It will be interesting to see how they choose to reflect any compensation changes made as a result of the pandemic. As long as they explicitly label adjustments as COVID related we will normalize them into the COVIDADJ column.