Federal Hall, 26 Wall Street, New York: It was on this site that the US Congress first met and where George Washington took the oath of office as the first president.

US financial giants getting injections of federal cash had liabilities to their executives of more than $40 billion for past years' pay and pensions as of the end of 2007, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows.

The US government is seeking to put a lid on executive pay at banks getting federal money

Congressman Henry Waxman, who is heading a House investigation of the financial crisis, requested nine big banking companies on Tuesday to explain why they are paying billions of dollars in compensation and bonuses after they accepted cash injections of $125 billion as part of the government’s $700 billion bailout program.

“While I understand the need to pay the salaries of employees, I question the appropriateness of depleting the capital that taxpayers just injected into the banks through the payment of billions of dollars in bonuses, especially after one of the financial industry’s worst years on record,” Waxman wrote in letters to the chief executives of the nine banks, which include Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase.

Waxman is the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and said the banks had spent or reserved a total of $108 billion for employee compensation and bonuses in the first nine months of this year, nearly the same amount as last year.

“Some experts have suggested that a significant percentage of this compensation could come in year-end bonuses and that the size of the bonuses will be significantly enhanced as a result of the infusion of taxpayer funds,”Waxman wrote. “According to one analyst, ‘Had it not been for the government’s help in refinancing their debt, they may not have had the cash to pay bonuses.’”

The Wall Street Journal says today that overlooked in these efforts is the total size of debts that financial firms receiving taxpayer assistance previously incurred to their executives, which at some firms exceed what they owe in pensions to their entire work forces.

The sums are mostly for special executive pensions and deferred compensation, including bonuses, for prior years. Because the liabilities include stock, they are subject to market fluctuation. Given the stock-market decline of this year, some may have fallen substantially.

Some examples: $11.8 billion at Goldman Sachs Group - - compared with its pension fund of $399 million for most of its employees, $8.5 billion at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., and $10 billion to $12 billion at Morgan Stanley.

The Journal says few firms report the size of these debts to their executives. (Goldman is an exception.) In most cases, the Journal calculated them by extrapolating from figures that the firms do have to disclose.