None of Australia's five largest banks would need to reconfigure their existing executive pay structures to comply with the government's planned Banking Executive Accountability Regime.That's the bottom-line assessment of remuneration and governance expert Dean Paatsch of Ownership Matters, who says executive pay arrangements at the four major retail banks and Macquarie Group already comply with reform proposals outlined in a Treasury consultation paper published in July.In the May Budget, the government announced that it would require the chief executives of all deposit-taking companies to wait for at least four years before they could receive 60 per cent of their variable or incentive-based pay.While the proposed measure last month triggered speculation that the country's big banks would circumvent such a measure by fattening the base pay of chief executives (and reducing short and long-term incentives), Paatsch believes the reform is already embedded in pay-setting practices across most ASX-listed banks."If the government was to implement the reform it would have a minimal impact on existing pay arrangements of the largest approved deposit-taking institutions," he told Banking Day."Most of the large banks would only need to make slight adjustments to comply with the proposed rule and Macquarie and Westpac would not have to make any changes at all."According to research contained in an Ownership Matters submission to Treasury, ANZ is the only one of the top five banks that falls well short of the CEO variable pay deferral benchmark.While the ANZ currently defers 50 per cent per cent of its chief executive's short-term bonuses over four years, only 5.3 per cent of long term incentive payments are deferred for four years or more.In its submission ANZ warned that introducing the proposed benchmark could result in some banks deciding to top-up the base salary of their top executives."If banks were required to defer the full forty per cent or sixty per cent of variable remuneration for four years then there may potentially be pressure for a shift towards an increased level of base remuneration," ANZ told Treasury."The optimal balance between fixed and variable remuneration will vary with each organisation…contingent remuneration with long vesting periods may be less valued by executives than more immediate reward."It may thus have reduced influence over their behaviour."Westpac struck a more conciliatory tone in its submission, stating that it supported deferring variable remuneration of CEOs and senior executives.However, it called for the government to provide a clearer definition of "variable remuneration" and to offer ADIs "a reasonable period of time" for transitional arrangements to be implemented.According to Paatsch's analysis, Westpac already defers 61 per cent of the long-term bonuses paid to its chief executive Brian Hartzer over four years.In a personal submission, Professor Kevin Davis (who sat on the Murray Inquiry) stated that not much could be understood about banker remuneration from the "hard to digest" pay disclosures in annual reports.Davis questioned the value of 2003 reforms to the Corporations Act, which removed the requirement for financial institutions to disclose the number of senior and non-senior executives earning more than