Griping about CEO pay is sort of like the old joke about the weather: Everybody complains, but no one ever does anything about it.

Just about everyone (except CEOs) agrees that most CEOs get paid too much—in many a case hundreds of times what the average employee earns. Part of the problem is that there seems to be no real connection between what they get paid ($14.8 million, on average, at an S&P 500 company) and what they do. Successful CEOs make a ton of money, but even unsuccessful business leaders make out really well and seem to cash in even as they are getting pushed out the door.

Even Michael Jensen, a professor emeritus at Harvard’s Graduate School of Business who “was an early inventor of bigger-than-life compensation packages for corporate chief executives,” according to The New York Times, now feels that CEO pay is out of control. His new book (co-written by University of Southern California business professor Kevin Murphy) is called CEO Pay and What to Do About It.

I’m sure the book has some good ideas in it, but the problem with CEO pay appears to be pretty basic: Many company directors—who are, after all, the people who approve the gargantuan CEO pay packages—don’t believe they are responsible for the runaway pay.

A recent story in Financial Week  (a sister publication of Workforce Management) reports on a survey by recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles and USC’s Marshall School of Business that shows that three out of 10 directors believe that CEO compensation is “too high in most cases.” In addition, nine out of 10 feel that CEO pay should be no more than two or three times more that of the next highest-paid executive.

So, why don’t these board members do anything about the CEO compensation problem? Well, they don’t think they are the cause. They blame the consultants. “As in the 2006 survey, board members see the actions of compensation consulting firms and the creation of new incentive compensation programs as the major reason for the continuing increase in CEO compensation,” according to a summary of the results.

I’m not a big fan of consultants, but really, do directors truly think that anyone will buy the notion that they aren’t to blame for runaway CEO pay? It’s really all about pay for performance, a concept that most companies seem to understand. But for whatever reason, it’s a notion that has gotten oddly twisted in the hands of those in the boardroom.