Walmart's poor sales don't keep top executives from getting millions in 'incentive' pay

Low sales won't keep Walmart's Bill Simon from getting incentive pay.

Walmart's stock prices and sales figures aren't doing so well. Its workers remain seriously underpaid. But its top executives are doing just fine, despite the retail giant's growth slowdown.
Walmart's executives are supposed to get incentive pay when Walmart is doing well. This should count as a time when Walmart is not doing so well. It turns out, though, that the company can make "adjustments" to the actual financial results to make it look like things are going better for the purposes of calculating incentive pay. That's routine. What's not routine is the number of adjustments made this year - 11, when, Gretchen Morgenson reports, "In each of the four previous years, the number of adjustments never exceeded five." And the adjustments have big effects:

    Consider the case of William S. Simon, president and C.E.O. of Walmart's United States unit. Under Walmart's pay plan, he would receive some incentive pay if sales grew more than 2 percent.
    The trouble was, Walmart's United States sales rose only 1.8 percent in fiscal 2014. That meant Mr. Simon would miss his threshold.
    Enter the adjustments.
    After adjusting for certain items relating to the company's sales, the Walmart unit eked out a growth rate of 2.03 percent in 2014. On the strength of that "adjusted" performance, Mr. Simon received $1.5 million, the proxy noted. His total compensation was $13 million last year.

Just another of Walmart's ways of dicking over their slaves workers and their patsies customers