Kenneth Feinberg presented at the Society of American Business Editors Conference Friday. (Photo: Mike Reicher)

The Obama administration’s executive compensation czar Kenneth Feinberg said Friday his program has worked well thus far and that he’ll be announcing a new round of pay restrictions next week.

Feinberg told a crowd of journalists at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Convention in Phoenix Friday that the administration’s efforts to tame executive compensation may be swaying companies to do it on their own. “There are some small early signs that what I am doing will have a voluntary impact,” he said.

As the Treasury Department’s special master for executive compensation, Feinberg was tapped by Obama in 2009 to regulate the pay of top executives at companies that received the most federal bailout funds.

They originally included the insurer AIG, Bank of America and Citigroup, auto companies Chrysler and General Motors, and their former finance divisions Chrysler Financial and GMAC. BofA and Citigroup were removed from his purview when they repaid the taxpayer funds to the government in late 2009. [VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP]

Wall Street executives, Feinberg said, have required careful handling and that they didn’t understand the public’s outrage. “The gap in perception between Wall Street and Main Street is a chasm,” he said. “It’s much more than I thought it would be.”

Listen to Feinberg describe negotiations with a Wall Street executive:

But with negotiations, Feinberg said he’s been able to overcome differences with executives’ expectations, he said. “For the most part, we’ve worked it out.”

One of the main changes he made is to eliminate guaranteed pay except for base salary. Under his plan, executives are typically paid with long-term stock grants, so pay is essentially tied into performance. Feinberg has mostly kept cash salaries to $500,000 or less.

The most sensitive part of the job, he said, was dealing with executives who are wrapped up in their compensation. “In our society, money is a surrogate for self-worth,” he said. “That’s where the emotion comes into it.”

Feinberg was previously the special master of the federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. In that role he distributed nearly $7 billion to more than 5,000 victims and families of victims of 9/11.

Audience members at the SABEW conference on Friday. (Photo: Mike Reicher)

Audience members tried to gauge Feinberg’s opinions of proposed financial regulatory reforms before Congress, but he declined to endorse certain programs. Instead, he said that his compensation rules, combined with other reforms, will lead companies to behave differently, eventually on their own.

“I doubt these companies are going to be able to go back to the old way of doing things,” he said.