Newly released filings with the Internal Revenue Service show former Kamehameha Schools trustee Henry Peters received $428,835 in deferred pay last year.

The filings, which cover the year ending June 30, 2006, also show that former trustees Matsuo Takabuki earned $270,135 in deferred compensation last year, while former state Supreme Court Chief Justice William Richardson received $47,696.

The filings for the first time give details about the compensation for former board members of the $7 billion charitable trust.

A deferred compensation plan is a tax-savings strategy that allows an executive to postpone the payment of part of his or her annual compensation until a later date, when the executive is in a lower tax bracket.

Kamehameha Schools offered a deferred compensation plan for key employees and trustees from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s.

Contacted at home yesterday, Peters said his deferred compensation is part of a retirement plan that he set up to provide for his family.

Peters said his past trustee pay was performance-based and was determined under a state law that at the time allowed trustees of charitable organizations to receive up to 2 percent of the organization's annual income.

He added that many of the estate's court-appointed masters have found the compensation was appropriate in their annual reviews of the estate's finances.

"We didn't have any retirement, a health plan or any other kind of those amenities. We just have those commissions and from those commissions, it was our responsibility to provide for our own future," Peters said. "Our compensation was performance-based. It was based on results."

Takabuki, who retired in 1993, and Richardson, who retired as trustee in 1992, could not be reached for immediate comment. When these three served as trustees, the charity was known as Bishop Estate.

APPROACHES CEO'S PAY

Peters' deferred compensation is about four times the amount paid to each of the current Kamehameha Schools trustees last year. It's also about three-quarters of the $574,230 that the charitable trust's Chief Executive Officer Dee Jay Mailer earned in 2006.

"That is a pretty big number," said Linda Lampkin, research director at ERI Economic Research Institute in Washington, D.C., and an executive pay expert specializing in the nonprofit sector.

Peters received the money from an individual deferred compensation plan he set up with trustee pay that he received in the 1980s and 1990s.

Before his resignation in 1999, Peters earned as much as $1 million a year as a trustee.

Peters, 66, is a former state House speaker. He served as a Kamehameha Schools trustee from 1984 until 1999 when he resigned along with fellow trustees Richard "Dickie" Wong, Lokelani Lindsey, Gerard Jervis and Oswald Stender.

The resignations came after the Internal Revenue Service threatened to revoke the charitable trust's tax-exempt status.

Kamehameha Schools spokeswoman Ann Botticelli had no comment on Peters' deferred pay.

COMPENSATION SLAMMED

When he resigned from the trust, Peters' deferred pay was criticized by the state attorney general's office. The AG's office — which had been seeking multi-million dollar fines against Peters and his fellow trustees — argued that Peters' deferred compensation was based on excessive pay that he received while he was trustee.

Deputy Attorney General Hugh Jones would not comment yesterday.

The estate's tax filings also show that Mailer's 2006 pay of $574,230 was up nearly $100,000, or about 21 percent, from her 2005 compensation of $474,240.

But even with the pay hike, Mailer was the estate's second-highest paid executive behind the trust's vice president of endowment, Kirk Belsby, who received $663,724 in total compensation last year.

Both Mailer and Belsby earned less than the $2.6 million average pay that the CEOs of Hawai'i's largest publicly traded companies received last year. But the salaries of the trust executives were in the general range of what top executives of the nation's largest nonprofits receive.

Lampkin, the Washington, D.C., executive pay expert, said the average annual compensation for top executives of charitable foundations with assets of $100 million or more was about $637,000 last year.

For large nonprofits including hospitals and universities with assets of $1 billion to $10 billion, the pay ranges between $513,000 a year and $1 million a year, Lampkin said.

HOW MUCH OTHERS MADE

Kamehameha Schools' tax filing for its 2006 fiscal year also listed the pay for several of its top executives, including: