Until 2012, Stanford University never had to disclose the compensation of an athletic coach. As a private school, it isn’t required to reveal its employment contracts — and it hadn’t paid a coach enough money to require that those figures be listed on its federal income tax returns.
On Friday evening, Stanford’s new tax records showed that during the 2014 calendar year, football coach David Shaw was credited with nearly $4.1 million in total compensation — the highest for any Stanford employee not only in 2014, but also in any one of the seven years under the IRS’ current reporting system.