Abbott, Langer Association Surveys FAQ#2

QUESTION:  Where do you get your information?

Abbott, Langer Association Surveys (ALAS) uses five distinct data sources to provide estimated base salary and total compensation in each survey:

1.        Compensation data for executives in tax-exempt/public organizations

Information is from public domain IRS Form 990 EOs/EZs/PFs and is obtained by ERI's optical character recognition (OCR) or digitization of these forms.  Over 2.5 million observations are added each year, and there are now compensation amounts for over 26 million nonprofit employees/directors in the SalariesReview database. Data is, in part, also leased for perpetual use from the Urban Institute and GuideStar and may contain industry assignment and other errors.  Standard errors are calculated from the distribution of the data and may be reproduced by observation.  Survey populations are counts of actual data points, all of which may not always be shown on graphic presentations as some outliers may be "off the chart."  The full dataset is available with the purchase of any ERI Nonprofit Comparables Assessor & Tax-Exempt Survey (CA+) subscription. This software enables many powerful analyses as it contains a wide range of management jobs, years 1992 to the present, for all US geographic areas/addresses, and with all available information categorized by industry, size, year, and geographic location.  Used by various State Attorney General Offices, with dozens of subscriptions from the national IRS TEE Office, extracts of this data can suffice as an "independent survey" as defined in IRC 4958 Intermediate Sanctions.  One might consider CA+ to be more a 100% census rather than a survey of all available executive compensation information. CA+ includes round dots where a cursor click will retrieve for-profit source documents, just as clicking on square dots will retrieve nonprofit source documents.

2.        Compensation data for executives in publicly-traded or for-profit companies

Information is digitized from US SEC 10-K, proxies, and 8-K filings. Canadian data is provided under agreement from SEDAR; UK/EU data is digitized manually from publicly available annual reports; and other financial data is leased.  ERI, ERI Salary Surveys, and ALAS have no control over any third-party data errors and further note that digitization is not a perfect science.  Survey populations, rates of statistical errors, and source documents are calculable and available for review with an Internet connection.  The full dataset for all industries is available with the purchase of any ERI Executive Compensation Assessor & Survey subscription, with many powerful analysis capabilities, years 1994 to the present, and all geographic areas/addresses for the for-profit sector.  The Executive Compensation Assessor & Survey dataset and program have been used by the US IRS National Appeals Office since the 1980s and is often used in Federal Tax Court in reasonable compensation cases.

3.        Compensation data for non-executive jobs in tax-exempt/public organizations

Information is principally from government and nonprofit organizations, using composite results of the US OES Occupational Employment and Wage Survey.  The word composite refers to ERI's reporting data from 2000 to 2005 using 620 US metropolitan and state OES areas.  In 2006, all states, except for Delaware, saw their geographic areas altered as a result of the 2000 US Census.  Reported with the OES' relative standard error and job family populations, ERI parses the family data into specific jobs using three eDOT Skills Project methodologies developed for its Occupational Assessor (Disability Determination Module) and graphically displays a probable distribution.  Relative salaries by position within a job family are profiled based upon competitive ranking for these jobs found within ERI's Salary Assessor.  The full dataset for all industries, all jobs, and all areas is available from PAQ's Salary Expert Global Salary Calculator.  The latter includes data leased from Statistics Canada and the UK National Statistics Office, covering 190 countries in all. US data is used for H-1B visa applications related to immigration, visas, and work permits and is updated in the late spring quarter of every year.

4.        Compensation data for non-executive jobs in publicly-traded or for-profit companies

This information on primarily for-profit company employees is from SalariesReview patented online, interactive salary surveys and Assessor Series databases.  In the past, only individual SalariesReview report pages could be purchased or were provided on a complimentary basis to a survey contributor. This survey has been collecting data since the late 1990s from online participants, with over 1.3 million entries to date.  With the acquisition of PAQ Services, Inc. (PAQ) in 2004, SalariesReview started incorporating data from over one million field job analyses, many of which included salary survey information.  In addition, salary data by postal code is collected in the PAQ eDOT Skills Project from 300,000 web visitors per month.  SalariesReview also includes web services data from loan and employment interview applications, where veracity of input is tested.  SalariesReview assigns a size and industry designation, matching employers found in ERI's Occupational Assessor's Potential Employer database. SalariesReview also collects job and task descriptions, counts of jobs identified, related physical and mental capacity requirements, and posted starting salaries or ranges from a review of job boards as allowed.  Over 1.5 million job postings are collected and archived each month, 19.8% containing salary data.  Web service tests contribute data to the ERI SalariesReview survey database; job board data is still being tested and is not now included.  These millions of line entries are only surpassed by nonprofit incumbent data, with some twenty million jobs' data being leased from GuideStar alone.  While errors in assignments may exist, they should be random, allowing the Central Limit Theory to apply.  Data from leased third-party surveys may also be incorporated. Population counts pertain to individual data contributed from all these sources.  Standard deviations are calculated from this collected data.  Like nonprofit data in the public domain, standard deviations may be graphically profiled and disclosed in the case of job board postings as and if allowed by those job boards' Terms of Use or under specific agreement with PAQ, BTA, and ERI.  The majority of this information reflects private sector employees' pay.  Beginning in 2007, ALAS data has been incorporated in the SalariesReview databases.

5.        Survey participant data from ERI Salary Surveys and Abbott, Langer Association Surveys traditional online and hardcopy survey questionnaires

This survey information is prepared the old-fashioned way with questionnaires sent out to past or requesting participants via the mail.  Online input is also available, as is the downloading of a PDF for printing and manual input.  Purchased in 2007 by ERI and included in this family of survey input variations (OCR, digitizing, web-service verification, job board data mining, PAQ field job analysts, Internet visitors, etc.), Abbott, Langer Association Surveys has been collecting and reporting data since 1967.  If a survey has been purchased through the ALAS site (www.abbott-langer.com), a third source line will be shown for both executive and non-executive jobs representing this fifth source of survey data.  Long a leader in providing nonprofit and association surveys, ALAS data is traditionally evenly divided between tax-exempt and for-profit participants.

For more information, please refer to the Abbott, Langer Association Surveys methodology.

For the most accurate, up-to-date salary information by position, industry, employer size, and location, we direct HR Professionals to ERI Economic Research Institute survey software.