Who Reads Those Footnotes, Anyway?
If you're trying to find the stuff that public companies would rather have you not know, you can generally find it buried in the footnotes of their filings. Michelle Leder and her colleagues at Footnoted.org read through the filings and uncover the egregious, the horrendous and the often simply bizarre arrangements that companies have to disclose. While the topics vary, most are tied to executive compensation and related perks.
Footnoted is currently conducting a poll to pick the dumbest footnote of the year (scroll to the bottom of this post to see the details). Readers can choose from among the following lowlights:
- Qwest allowing the stepdaughter of the CEO to use the corporate jet to commute to high school.
- Whole Foods CEO John Mackey hiding in the newsgroups on Yahoo Finance
- Morgans Hotels spending $30k per month on a corporate apartment for its CEO (I guess he didn't think their own property offered acceptable accomodations)
- i2 Technologies spending $1 million to fly its CEO between home and work (6x what they spent for the same the prior year)
- Countrywide giving president David Sambol a $2.7 million bonus just before the stock imploded
You can vote at the Footnoted.org site (poll is on the right hand toolbar). And thanks, Michelle, for reading all the fine print all year long.
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