I have just transferred a new database to our platform. It has almost all of the director compensation data in our archives. What is excluded are those observations where we have multiple tables for one CIK year. While there are 30/40 of these cases in most years there are 550 from 2020. These cases mostly occur when the registrant anticipates not being able to file their DEF 14A on time and so they file an amended 10-K with information for Items 10-14. And then later they will file their proxy (DEF 14A). Our intention is to carefully review the duplicate cases to ensure we are distributing the data from the proxy.

There are definitely more quality checks we can run on this data and we will do so. Another reason some data is not available is because of the cases where the sum of the components of the compensation does not equal the total that is reported. We set a cut-off value for a difference of +/- $10,001. We have to review these. Sometimes the error made is clear and easy to identify, for example a transposition error or the registrant used last years table as a model while preparing their disclosure but left last year’s total in one or more rows. In other cases it is a decimal issue. While we do attempt to contact registrants when these totals differ, most do not respond and thus we will release data with a mismatched sum after we have attempted to review the data.

When you previously accessed this data through a request file, the year you specified was the document year. Now the data is available for the data year.

I have written before that detailed director compensation was not a required disclosure until 2006. We do have some limited data from 2004 and 2005. I researched these and saw that most were reported in 10-K filings that were either extremely late or were amended for some financial reporting issue. Somehow some registrants determined they needed to include the Item 9-14 data even when the tabular director compensation data was not required for that particular reporting year.

Personally I am excited about the accessibility we are able to provide with this new interface. To generate the results you see in the first image, I selected the DIRECTOR_COMP database and hit the Execute button. Doing so will generate a complete list of all rows in the database (I would be careful with respect to trying this trick with the FILING_TIMES data.

I wanted to compare the proportion of female directors in 2008 with the proportion in 2020. I ran the following query to first identify the total number of directors in 2008

(YEAR  = 2008)

To check for women I added AND (GENDER = “F”). As you can see this returned 3,854 results

With out getting too precise, less than 10% of directors in this group were women.

We currently have 30,070 directors compensation observations for 2020. As you can see in the image below, the number of women increased to 7,066 ~ 23% of the total population.

There is more coming – all of the tabular data we currently have will be ported to this delivery modality. It will take time but it will make it more accessible. And, as I was working on preparing this data for the platform I realized that we need to add the ability to filter by PERSON_CIK. For example, suppose you pull some executive comp and you want to check whether any of your sample are/were directors of other registrants. You should have that ability and so that feature has been added to the list.