grade has a designated salary range. Within each grade, salaries are determined within the applicable salary range based primarily on subjective factors such as the employee’s contribution to our company and individual performance. On occasion, an employee’s compensation may be fixed at a level above or below the maximum and minimum levels for the employee’s salary grade in response to a subjective determination regarding the employee.
The Compensation Committee recognized that Mr. Edwards’ compensation as CEO should reflect his greater policy- and decision-making authority and his higher level of responsibility with respect to our strategic direction and our financial and operating results. At January 1, 2021, our CEO’s annual base salary was approximately 94% higher than the annual base salary for the next highest-paid named executive officer and approximately 128% higher than the average annual base salary for all other named executive officers.
In typical years, base salaries are reviewed at least annually and may also be adjusted from time to time to realign salaries with external market levels after considering individual responsibilities, performance and contribution to our company, experience, internal pay equity and budgetary issues. Since 2014, however, the depressed offshore drilling market has caused us to undertake numerous cost-cutting measures, including
and freezes on general salary increases and new hiring. Consistent with those measures, except for increases related to promotions, base salaries for our named executive officers were not increased during 2020.
On May 5, 2020, Dominic A. Savarino was promoted from Vice President and Chief Tax Officer to Vice President and Chief Accounting & Tax Officer, and the Compensation Committee approved a corresponding increase in annual base salary for Mr. Savarino from $375,000 to $400,000, which also prompted the approval of a corresponding increase in the annual base salary of Scott L. Kornblau, the company’s Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, from $410,000 to $435,000.
Key Employee Incentive Plan
In recent years prior to 2020, we adopted annual and long-term incentive award programs intended to promote company performance objectives and to recognize key employees who contributed to the company’s achievements. Our past programs would typically provide the opportunity to earn compensation that would be
at-risk
on an annual basis or a longer-term basis and would be contingent on achievement of high individual performance and one or more company financial performance goal(s). Our annual incentive award programs were payable in cash, and our long-term incentive award programs were typically payable in RSUs, SARs and/or cash.
In anticipation of our financial restructuring activities in 2020, in April 2020 our company engaged Alvarez & Marsal North America, LLC, a compensation consulting and financial advisory firm (which we refer to as A&M) to provide financial advice and compensation recommendations for incentivizing and motivating our senior management and key employees to achieve our business objectives and complete a successful restructuring process. Based on that analysis, we determined that a narrowly-tailored cash-based incentive program designed to properly incentivize critical eligible employees was appropriate and would maximize our going-concern value for the benefit of our stakeholders. With the assistance of A&M, our Compensation Committee and Board developed and adopted the KEIP to provide our nine executive-level key employees, including the named executive officers, with performance-based cash incentive opportunities covering the
one-year
performance period from April 1, 2020 through March 31, 2021. The KEIP was approved by the Bankruptcy Court and our principal creditors and other stakeholders in June 2020.
The KEIP was adopted in lieu of any other annual or long-term incentive award program for the participants for 2020 and was structured so that each plan participant would receive an opportunity to earn a cash incentive payment at a target amount commensurate with the target annual cash incentive and target long-term incentive opportunities that would have otherwise been available for the participating employees under our historical incentive programs. As a result, no awards were made to the nine participating executives during 2020 under any incentive plans other than the KEIP. In addition, as a condition to participating in the KEIP, participating employees forfeited all of their outstanding unvested incentive awards previously granted to the employee under our previously-existing employee incentive plans, consisting of RSUs, SARs and cash incentive awards.
Under the KEIP, each of the nine participants was eligible to earn a performance-driven cash incentive payment following the completion of each of the second, third and fourth calendar quarters of 2020 and the first calendar