2017 was a rough year for Equifax, as the company made national headlines for all the wrong reasons. And corporate VP and CLO John Kelley's compensation appears to reflect that. Kelley, who was No. 1 on the executive comp list for Georgia last year, had his total cash compensation slashed by more than 54 percent . It totaled $548,939 last year, down from about $1.2 million the year before.

While Kelley's salary remained about the same from 2016 to 2017, he received no bonus or nonequity incentives last year—a drastic decrease in his take-home cash haul, given that he received $655,547 in nonequity incentives the year before. Kelley did, however, earn another $1 million or so in stock awards and options last year, which was slightly up from the $957,302 he received in stock the previous year.

Prior to joining Equifax in 2013, Kelley was a senior partner at King & Spalding, where he handled corporate finance transactions and securities matters and advised public clients regarding SEC reporting.

Interestingly, issues of securities disclosures and approval thrust Kelley into the spotlight in the wake of last year's massive data breach at Equifax.

Late in 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported that a special committee formed by Equifax's board of directors was examining Kelley's role in approving the share sales of four executives the committee determined sold stocks in the days after suspicious activity in the company's networks became known.

Those individuals did not engage in insider trading, the internal committee concluded, but the timeline around the securities sales has been a point of contention, particularly for federal lawmakers.