Few among us have never given a thought to our credit score: It usually comes up when you buy a house or take out an insurance policy, and the underlying credit history is sometimes even used to evaluate job candidates.

Which brings us neatly to Jordan W. Graham, who was an executive vice-president at Fair Isaac Corp. until earlier this year. Fair Isaac, of course, is the architect of the ubiquitous FICO credit score used to slice and dice consumers into various buckets of creditworthiness, and Graham’s position — trumpeted with great fanfare on his hiring in July 2010 — was to have a big role in that very business, to “direct the growth of the company’s FICO® scores and myFICO® businesses.” (We’d love it if he really did say those registered-trademark symbols, because we’re dying to know how they’re pronounced.)

At the time, Fair Isaac Chief Executive Mark Greene praised Graham’s experience as a former Citigroup, Match.com and Sun Microsystems executive, and said the company expected him “to make meaningful contributions to our business as a member of the FICO executive team and create value not only for credit grantors but for the American public…”

Here’s hoping he worked fast, because Graham stayed employed just shy of nine months after that announcement. On April 20, Fair Isaac disclosed his departure with a terse 34-word 8-K that chalked his departure up to “organizational changes resulting in the elimination of his position.”

From that, it isn’t clear whether Jordan was a lousy fit for the job and company, or whether Greene and the board were really bad at planning ahead (or perhaps just fickle), or whether perhaps something else entirely was going on. Whatever the case, Jordan was compensated pretty well for his troubles, though the details only became available yesterday.

According to the proxy that Fair Isaac filed yesterday morning, Jordan is walking away with nearly $1.5 million from his short stint. That includes his pay, as well as severance of a cool $1 million or so: 175% of his $450,000 base salary (totaling $787,500), a $225,000 guaranteed cash incentive payment for fiscal 2011, and continued health and life insurance for a year (a value estimated at $13,280, for which he presumably didn’t have to provide his FICO score).

All told, Graham worked about 266 days, weekends included, by our back-of-the-envelope calculation, which works out to roughly 190 week-days at $7,895 or so a day (and $987 an hour, if he worked a straight 40-hour week). Not bad for what turned out to be a temporary job, and he still has his part-time gig as a a director of RLI Corp. (RLI), where the company’s proxy says he made $125,000 in fees in 2010 (surprisingly low, in our experience, for a $1.5-billion market-cap company).

It’s harder to say how well Graham’s stint at Fair Isaac has worked out for shareholders. The company’s stock has seen a bumpy ride, but the shares have done pretty well since Graham was hired, up 43% in all; most of that time was tracking or modestly trailing the S&P 500, until the last three months or so.

Naturally, as a mere executive vice-president, Graham can’t take all the credit or blame for the stock performance while he was on the job. From the 10-Q that Fair Isaac filed on May 10 — covering the six-month period squarely during Graham’s tenure — it’s pretty tough to figure out how well he did, since both six-month segment tables are headed “Six Months Ended March 31, 2011″ (even though presumably, one is really for the prior-year period). In other filings, Fair Isaac puts the comparison period second, so assuming that’s the case, operating income for the Scores segment through March 31, 2011, fell 6.1% on a revenue decline of 2.7%.

Make of that what you will. In the end, we doubt that Graham’s short stint at Fair Isaac made much of a ding in his credit score, if employment tenure even factors into the calculation (though pretty much everything else under the sun seems to affect your credit score, so why not, right?).

As for scoring Fair Isaac itself, if we were in charge, we’d bump it down a notch for spending an awful lot of money on a temp, however experienced.

Image source: Brick wall with light effect and clock photo via Shutterstock.com

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See more of what’s in the filings, while it still matters: Check out footnotedPro, where we highlight unusual opportunities and potential problems well in advance of the market. In 2011, we gave subscribers a heads-up about four acquisitions and an early warning on AMR’s bankruptcy, and also flagged dozens of other potential problems and opportunities. To find out what you’re missing in SEC filings, and to inquire about a trial subscription, email Todd Serpico.

A few weeks ago, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, opened an investigation into what he called ”lavish” pay practices at for-profit colleges. (Bloomberg’s report on the matter is here; the Wall Street Journal’s is here.)

It’s a touchy subject, because the for-profit schools receive tens of billions of dollars in Pell grants and federal student loans, yet a recent newsletter published by the National Education Association cited government data that

“…students at for-profit institutions represent just 12 percent of all higher-education students – but 26 percent of all student loans and 46 percent of all student loan dollars in default.  Their students carry a median debt of $14,000, while most of their counterparts at public community colleges don’t borrow a single penny.”

We were actually surprised that last week didn’t prove to be as much of a dumping ground as we would have expected. Friday, in particular, was unusually slow for a pre-holiday Friday. Still, while there wasn’t an avalanche, there were a few tasty truffles, like this separation agreement with former Chief Marketing Officer Kim Feil that was buried in the 10-Q that Walgreens (WAG) filed on Thursday.

Judging by a quick Google search, Feil was a prominent public face for the drugstore chain. There are a whole bunch of videos where Feil talks about social media, Walgreens mobile strategy and other hot topics. Given how public of a role she played, we were surprised that we couldn’t find any announcement in Walgreens filings that she had left the company on Sept. 30. We imagine it has something to do with this announcement that Walgreen’s made last March about Feil’s new boss. But that’s really only a guess.

The separation agreement itself isn’t all that lavish. Unlike some other recent agreements we’ve footnoted, Feil doesn’t even get to keep her iPad (assuming she even had one). Indeed, the agreement notes that “no later than his/her Termination Date, Employee will have returned all Company property, and no Company property has been retained by the Employee, regardless of the form in which it was acquired or held by Employee.” In other similar agreements, it’s fairly common to keep the cell phone and laptop computer.

For the past two weeks, we’ve been asking footnoted readers to vote for the best disclosure of 2011. There were a lot of good ones this year, though of course when we say good, or best, we really mean bad or worst.

This year, footnoted readers awarded the top prize to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and its former CEO, Léo Apotheker, who managed to get paid very handsomely for failing so spectacularly.  Exactly how much Apotheker made for his 11-month stint at HP is subject to a bit of interpretation and involves a very careful parsing of both his employment agreement that was filed Oct. 1, 2010 and the separation agreement that was filed three months ago. Various estimates we’ve seen pin it at somewhere between $25 million and $33 million. But one thing that isn’t open to interpretation: during Apotheker’s 11-month stint, HP stock declined by more than 40%. Perhaps that’s why 1/3 of those who participated in the survey selected this particular disclosure over some of the others on our list.

Since we seriously doubt that HP will provide a full accounting of Apotheker’s payments when it files its proxy next month, we decided to take a whack at it. What we came up with was $36 million, and that’s assuming that the bonus he was promised for fiscal 2011 comes in at the 200% of his base salary of $1.2 million, as opposed to the top range of 500%.

We periodically razz companies that thumb their noses at investors’ wishes: In some cases they keep directors around despite resounding no-confidence votes from shareholders. In others they seemingly ignore it when a sizable minority of their stockholders votes against the board’s recommendations on a shareholder proposal or director nomination.

So let’s call attention to a company that is, in its own way, acknowledging shareholder discontent: Allstate (ALL), which on Wednesday afternoon quietly filed an 8-K noting a variety of changes to its severance, options and restricted-stock award agreements.

At first glance, these changes look a lot like end-of-year housekeeping. But, whether by design or coincidence, the changes also appear to address some of the criticisms leveled at the company’s pay practices by Institutional Shareholder Services, the behemoth of the proxy-advisory business.