That is because it used the amount of pay that was taken as an expense for each executive each year. There were two problems with that. First, it spread options awards over several years based on when the options vested. That meant that an executive could be given a huge options grant, perhaps on hiring, without the company having to disclose it, even if that was the largest pay package the company gave out that year.

The second problem was that accounting for options can produce some strange results. Under some circumstances, the expense can turn negative if the share price plunges. That meant some executives were reported as having worked without pay  even if their salaries were in the millions. In some cases, identical grants to two executives could produce wildly different results if one of the executives was old enough to retire.

The new summary table will count the grants as they are made. If someone gets a mega-grant, he or she is likely to show up in that year’s proxy disclosure. If a company chooses not to give options to an executive  perhaps because of poor performance  that will show up with a clarity that was not present before.

The new rules also will require companies to disclose if compensation policies are increasing the risk of the company having to take large losses, as seems to have happened in financial institutions before the crisis. There are unlikely to be many such disclosures, but being forced to think about it could produce needed changes in policies.

The game that is left open for companies to play concerns the valuation of performance-based incentives  ones that will pay off if the company hits certain goals. The value shown in the summary table will be the amount the company thinks is the most probable to be paid. It could even be zero. A footnote will show the maximum value for the executive if everything goes right, but it is the value in the table that is most likely to be noticed.

Auditors will have to sign off on that probable value, but since it relies on forecasts of the future, they are unlikely to challenge even halfway reasonable estimates. Since the exact performance targets are often not disclosed, it will be hard to tell if a company is being excessively conservative in estimating the value.

The summary table, even if it is as good as anyone can design, cannot tell the full story. Much of the value in pay packages comes from restricted stock and stock options, whose ultimate value will be clear only years later. New “claw-back” provisions may mean that this year’s grant could vanish next year. Other parts of the proxy will still show the profits executives realize when they cash in those grants, and deserve attention from investors.

Executive compensation is getting more attention this year than it may deserve, stirred by anger over the bonuses paid by banks that would be dead but for government bailouts. At least now we will be in a better position to intelligently discuss how much the pay really was.