Directors get rich(er)

Law of Unintended Consequences Dept: Back in the bad old days of Enron, WorldCom, blah, blah, blah, directors of corporate boards made pretty good money (typically low six figures) by sweeping into town a couple of times a year, signing off on a few management proposals, and perhaps playing a round or two of golf at the company retreat. Easy peasy. Not many directors took their job all that seriously, which meant they left the CEO to pretty much rule the roost. Then, a lot of bad stuff hit the fan, resulting in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. All of a sudden, directors were personally responsible for the bottom lines of the companies they oversaw. As a result they started paying more attention - and asking for more money. And getting it. Board service is "a job now," Patrick McGurn, a corporate governance told Bloomberg. The typical director of a large corporation made $216,000 last year, according to compensation experts Pearl Meyer & Partners, up from $129,667 in 2003.

Actually, that's pretty tame compared with the directors who belong to more than one board. They're picking up low seven-figures, according to a piece in the Feb. 22 edition of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and that doesn't cover the often-considerable pay from their day jobs. Some examples from 2008:

Anthony P. Terracciano 2008 board pay: $4,789,993 (SLM, $4.8 million; Sovereign Bancorp, zero) Terracciano, a former executive at Chase Manhattan and First Union, is making a second career out of his chairmanship of student loan giant SLM. He declined to comment, but SLM says he has twice taken voluntary pay cuts and pushed back stock grants.

Jack Randall 2008 board pay: $1,561,220 (XTO Energy) An oil-and-gas investment banker, Randall has sat on the XTO board since 1997, and his firm, Jefferies & Co., does consulting and banking work for XTO. Both XTO, which is in the process of being acquired by Exxon, and Randall declined to comment. Much of his pay has been in XTO stock.

Larry C. Glasscock 2008 board pay: $1,356,540 (Wellpoint, $853,750; Zimmer Holdings, $244,926; Sprint Nextel, $257,864) Glasscock, the onetime CEO of health insurer Wellpoint, made more than $80 million during his last four years as chief, and now serves as chairman. Glasscock, who didn't respond to requests for comment, recently announced he would be stepping down from the board in March.