EBay, the online marketplace, plans to give its employees an average of $318,000 each in stock options this year, according to one estimate. While the company's workers may welcome such a windfall, some investors and a proxy advisory firm are criticizing what they believe is as an example of excessive compensation that hurts shareholder returns. The topic will be at the forefront at EBay's annual shareholder meeting today in New Orleans. Investors will vote on whether the company can continue to grant stock options to employees in 2004 as it has in the past. "EBay's proposed equity compensation plans are some of the most egregious we have reviewed," according to a report by Glass Lewis, a San Francisco company that advises big investors on how to vote on corporate plans, known as proxies. As evidence, Glass Lewis compared EBay's stock option awards with those at 70 other service companies with market capitalizations of between $1 billion and $232 billion. Those companies awarded workers an average of $6,468 in equity compensation, or nearly 50 times less than EBay, according to the Glass Lewis estimate. To be fair, the value of EBay's option awards can be a bit deceiving. The employee average is skewed by the large awards given to a handful of top executives. In other words, not everyone is receiving $300,000 in options
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