Compensation for U. S. personnel overseas;

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U.S. cPefsoritiel
Overseas
by Alexander Berger
This article offers a rounded picture of how to de­velop
an overseas compensation plan. The Interna­tional
Coordinating Office's interest in this field grew
out of its program of placing CPAs from the U.S.A.
firm in key spots in our International Group. The
I.C.O.'s experience is available to any Touche, Ross
office having clients with similar problems.
In a recent four-year period, more than 1,800 new
U.S. enterprises were started in Europe. In the Euro­pean
Common Market alone, the book value of direct
investment by U.S. firms rose from $1.9 billion in 1958
to $5.4 billion in 1964. These statistics do not show the
number of U.S. personnel moving to overseas jobs, but
we do know that the number of U.S. personnel working
overseas today is larger than ever before, and that this
number continues to increase.
These facts are significant in many ways. Not the
least is that personnel departments and wage admin­istrators
have had to make comprehensive studies on
compensation for U.S. citizens employed in foreign
countries. Indeed, after his preliminary survey the
salary administrator arranging a compensation pack­age
for personnel going overseas is apt to wish for the
good old days when he was only concerned with em­ployees
in the U.S. That compensation package was
simple and straightforward. He was concerned only
with such matters as straight time pay or salary, ar­rangements
for overtime, insurance and pension plans,
profit sharing, bonuses, attracting those men with the
highest potential, keeping up with or ahead of the
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Alex Berger
Alex Berger joined the International Coordinating Office
in March of this year as Director of International Publications.
He was formerly supervisory editor at Prentice-Hall, Inc. where
he wrote and edited several books in the accounting and allied
fields.
Mr. Berger has a B.A. from New York University, and did
graduate work in Sociology at the New School for Social Re­search.
He is a member of the AICPA, the New York State
Society of CPAs and the National Association of Accountants.
competition, and the like. For the U.S. citizen employed
in a foreign country (commonly referred to as an ex­patriate),
all of these matters are still involved, but
many other factors must also be considered.
Compensation of an employee in the U.S. is usually
determined by agreement with the employee himself.
But, send the same employee overseas, and you may
find the employee's wife making demands. Even if she
doesn't, a potential move to a foreign country is bound
to be a matter for family discussion and decision.
All of this adds up to the need for a carefully planned
system of overseas compensation that is fair to all
concerned. The inadequacies of a poorly conceived
compensation plan may be discovered too late, only
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