ICF bonuses

From a CNN report today on the Road Home program in Louisiana....

SUSAN ROESGEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over: An empty lot is all that's left of Antoinette Page's New Orleans home after hurricane Katrina. But she's still paying the mortgage on this invisible house and getting deeper in debt. Insurance paid just $2,400 and Paige has been waiting almost a year to get help from a Federally funded program called the road home.

PAGE: This is unbelievable. I never thought the day would come that this would happen to the citizens of Louisiana and I know it's just not me. A lot of people I've spoken to are going through the same thing.

ROESGEN: She's one of nearly 140,000 people in Louisiana who have applied for road home assistance and only 20,000 of those have actually gotten money. And the private company hired by the state to run the program, ICF International, which also runs several other programs, just gave its top people big bonuses. ICFs chief financial officer Alan Stewart got a bonus of $650,000. Chief operating officer John Wasson got a bonus of $1 million. And ICF chairman Sudako Keshavek (ph) got $1.7 million because ICF did pretty well last year. The company says those bonuses have nothing to do with the success or failure of the road home program. But, still, the fat paychecks are galling to people like Antoinette Page who doesn't have a dime to pay off the mortgage on her empty lot.
(emphasis mine)

Comments

[Maitri]

Sudhakar Keshavan - not that I like the man, but the least CNN can do is slight research to get the name right.

[Interrobang]

Maltri, that "(ph)" after the name indicates that it's a phonetic spelling taken off the audio portion of the broadcast. CNN does not prepare its own transcripts, either; there are actually a ton of private companies that do it. So it isn't CNN's lack of research, it's some rapid transcriptionist causing the error. (Probably, knowing the way these things work from having been peripherally in the industry, that transcriptionist is a low-paid telecommuter on a very tight deadline, and working from a tape.)