Deferred compensation is that portion of employee compensation that has been set aside for future payment. Firms create plans to manage the assets that will be used to settle these liabilities. Consequently, deferred compensation assets are a non-operating liability, which is to say that they are not part of the invested capital that is used to earn net operating profit after tax (NOPAT) for shareholders.
Firms may report its deferred compensation assets on the face of the balance sheet, which makes discovery a trivial affair, or, off the face of the balance sheet, hidden in its notes. The former requires an exegesis of the nomenclature, while the latter requires a work of excavation that analysts and investors are usually not willing to do.