Goldman Partners Sitting Pretty on Pay

By John Carney, Senior Editor, CNBC.com

NEW YORK (CNBC) -- Although it seems like a tough week for Wall Street paychecks, partners at Goldman Sachs(GS) are probably not fretting.

Sure, Goldman cut its overall accrual for employee pay and benefits in the first quarter by 16%.

But the amount of compensation per partner appears to have declined by far less--just about two-thirds of 1%, by my calculation.

Goldman set aside $4.4 billion for benefits and compensation in the first quarter of 2012, a 16% decline from last year's $5.23 billion first-quarter compensation figure.

But Goldman also shed a record number of partners last year and early this year. Although Goldman doesn't disclose the total number of partners, an analysis by The New York Times and Footnoted.org published in January indicated that 50 partners had left the firm and 10 were added. That brought the number of partners to 442 at the close of the year, down from 483 at the start of the year.

A source familiar with the matter says that 34 more partners have either left the firm or announced their intention to leave. Goldman declined to comment on the number. That would mean that Goldman would have just 408 partners left. Those of you doing the math will note that this would indicate a 15.32% partnership contraction.

It's very common for analysts and journalists to divide the total compensation accrual at firms by the number of employees, producing an average pay per employee. Goldman shed about 3,000 employees this year, reducing its headcount to 32,000. That produces an average pay per employee of $135,123 for the first three months of the year, an 8.6% decline from last year's first quarter number of $147,825.

In other words, Goldman is setting aside less money for each of its employees.