The firm did not comment on the size of this year's discretionary bonuses.

"I would therefore ask that my discretionary bonus reflect this by an appropriate amount."

This does not include the annual discretionary bonus.

Those executives receive discretionary bonuses that in good years can equal several times the size of their annual salaries.

At Disney, his annual compensation was to be $1 million a year plus a discretionary bonus of up to $10 million.

Other specialists recommend offering to give discretionary bonuses to potential hires based on their performance, in lieu of a higher salary.

Their corporation tax was low, they claim, because of losses made previously, they, of course, still paid out discretionary bonuses.

"This was not a little discretionary bonus at the end of the year," one A.I.G. executive said.

Despite the significant reduction of discretionary bonuses, this article persists in giving the impression that a cornucopia of them is still available.

Goldman's elite securities traders and investment bankers are seeing their discretionary bonuses chopped by as much as 75 percent.

Mr Horkulak traded derivatives on a 3 year fixed contract paying £250k with an annual discretionary bonus.

The maker of stainless steel sheet and strip and electrical steels will also pay $6 million as a 4 percent discretionary bonus to employees.

A good illustration of the effect of this policy is in midtown Manhattan, where the commission eliminated a host of discretionary bonuses and waivers in 1982.

If an employee is awarded a discretionary bonus that is not guaranteed based upon specific work criteria, this bonus does not qualify for retroactive overtime.

As well as individual contractual bonus arrangements, banks often have one or more discretionary bonus schemes to provide motivational structures to more junior staff without giving any entitlements.

The company said it had paid Mr. Katzenberg millions of dollars in "discretionary bonuses" before 1988 even though he had not earned a bonus based on the performance of the productions.

The league said it was offering a 60 percent pay increase; the union countered that those figures were misleading because discretionary bonus money now being paid to some officials will be part of the base salary in the new contract.

Although the Regulator was given the option of not forcing Equitable to build reserves for discretionary bonuses, that did not absolve the authorities from their duty of financial supervision covering the "assurance undertaking's entire business".

Most investment firms are still assessing the damage, but Goldman, Sachs & Company, Wall Street's last remaining private investment bank, has said it will cut discretionary bonuses to its top people by as much as 75 percent.

The legal test for whether a bank's decision on discretionary bonus awards can be challenged as a breach of contract is whether it can be seen as irrational, Quain added, in that no other reasonable bank would have come to the same decision.

Horkulak v Cantor Fitzgerald International [2004] EWCA Civ 1287 is a UK labour law case holding that a discretionary bonus may form part of the damages for wrongful dismissal, if the sum of bonuses is predictable.

Paul Quain, a partner at GQ Employment Law, said: "Although the banks will have a robust case, there are still likely to be legal claims in the new year because the concept of having the right to receive a discretionary bonus is so strongly embedded in the minds of many bank staff.

Although the officials agreed with the league proposals to significantly increase base salary, they argued that the figures are misleading because discretionary bonus money, which has gone to some but not all officials in the past, has been eliminated, by agreement of both sides, and has been redistributed as part of the base salary structure.