For the past 30 years, the conventional wisdom has been that executive compensation packages should include very large proportions of incentive pay. This incentive pay orthodoxy has become so firmly entrenched that the current debates about executive compensation simply take it as a given. We...

In an earlier article (The Untold Story of Sun Capital: Disguised Dividends, 142 Tax Notes 556 (2014)), I argued that in many cases monitoring fees paid by private-equity controlled companies should be recharacterized as nondeductible dividends. This recharacterization would increase the tax...