"The Treasury Secretary gets to decide whether or not the awards being given to executive officers are excessive," says Anderson. "The Treasury Secretary made $750 million when he was a CEO on Wall Street. I don't think he's the right person to decide what's excessive."

The bill also states that if a financial institution's earnings turn out to have been grossly misstated, the executives who earned bonuses based on those earnings will have to forfeit their bonuses.

The final provision on executive pay pertains to or golden parachutes. It prohibits financial institutions that sell their assets directly to the government from "making any golden parachute payment" to senior executives while the Secretary holds stake in the company. In other words, if one of the top five highest paid executives in the company leaves after the Treasury Secretary takes control of the company's assets, that executive won't get the golden parachute that might have been laid out for him in his severance package. New executives who join the company after the Secretary buys its assets and who are among the highest paid won't get a golden parachute either, during the time the Secretary holds those assets.

For firms that sell their assets to the government through an auction, only new executives who join the company after the government buys their assets won't be given golden parachutes. On the other hand, executives who presided over companies that collapsed in the financial crisis could conceivably coast away with millions of dollars in severance if the assets the government acquired through auction were valued at less than $300 million.

Anderson says these restrictions on executive pay only apply for two years after the Secretary takes over a company's assets.