It was  what the Washington Post calls “one of the simpler parts of a mammoth and complicated law”: a provision of the Dodd-Frank Act requiring publicly held companies to disclose the ratio of their CEO pay to their median-employee pay.

But three years after Dodd-Frank, the Securities and Exchange Commission has yet to write a rule implementing that requirement, “with no sign of when it will be done,” according to Post reporters Jerry Markon and Dina ElBoghdady (“Pay Rule Still Unwritten Amid Corporate Push,” 7/7/13).

“A lobbying campaign waged by business executives and the nation’s most prominent corporate associations undercut the [SEC’s early] momentum and effectively brought the agency’s work on the rule to a standstill,” the article continues, citing interviews with SEC insiders and others.

Industry sources have insisted that such a rule would put an onerous burden on businesses, what with currency fluctuations, temp and part-time workers, international differences in benefit packages, and other such complexities.

“That’s absurd,” AFR’s Lisa Donner told the Post. “It’s not that complicated.” Lobbyists, Donner added, have intimidated the SEC into “slow-walking” its work on the issue.