Thousands of top traders and bankers on Wall Street were awarded huge bonuses and pay packages last year, even as their employers were battered by the financial crisis.

Nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008, according to a report released Thursday by Andrew Cuomo, the New York attorney general.

At Goldman Sachs, for example, bonuses of more than $1 million went to 953 traders and bankers, and at Morgan Stanley 428 employees were in the $1 million-plus bonus pool. Even at weaker banks like Citigroup and Bank of America, million-dollar awards were distributed to hundreds of workers.

The report is certain to intensify the growing debate over how, and how much, Wall Street bankers deserve to be paid.

In January, President Barack Obama called the bankers shameful for giving themselves nearly $20 billion in bonuses as the economy was faltering and the government was spending billions of dollars to bail out financial institutions.

Today, the House of Representatives may vote on a bill that would order bank regulators to restrict inappropriate or imprudently risky pay packages at larger banks.

Cuomo, who for months has attacked the companies for their pay practices, said the bonuses were particularly galling because the banks were able to survive the crisis because of the governments support.

If the bank lost money, where do you get the money to pay the bonus? he said.

All the banks named in the report declined to comment.

But Cuomos belief that compensation for every employee in a financial firm should rise and fall in line with their employers overall results is not shared on Wall Street, which tends to reward employees based more on their individual performance. If they do not, the thinking goes, they could easily leave for another firm that would reward them more directly.

Many banks partly base their bonuses on their overall results, but Cuomo has said they should do so to a greater degree.

At Morgan Stanley, for example, compensation last year was more than seven times as large as the banks profit. In 2004 and 2005, when the stock markets were doing well, Morgan Stanley spent only two times its profits on compensation

Robert Profusek, an attorney with Jones Day, which works with many of the large banks, said bank executives and boards of directors spend considerable time deciding bonuses based on the value of workers to their companies.

Theres this assumption that everyone was like drunken sailors passing out money without regard to the consequences or without giving it any thought, he said. That wasnt the case.

Cuomos office did not study the correlation between all of the individual bonuses and the performance of the people who received them.

Congressional leaders have introduced several other bills aimed at reining in the bank bonus culture. Federal regulators and a new government pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, are also scrutinizing bank bonuses, which have fueled populist outrage. Incentives that led to large bonuses on Wall Street are often cited as a cause of the financial crisis.

Though it has been known for months that billions of dollars were spent on bonuses last year, it was unclear whether that money was spread widely or concentrated among a few workers.

The report suggests that those roughly 5,000 people a small subset of the industry accounted for more than $5 billion in bonuses. At Goldman, just 200 people collectively were paid nearly $1 billion in total, and at Morgan Stanley, $577 million was shared by 101 people.

All told, the bonus pools at the nine banks that received bailout money was $32.6 billion dollars, while those same banks lost $81 billion.

Some compensation experts questioned whether the bonuses should have been paid at all while the banks were receiving government aid.

There are some real ethical questions given the bailouts and the precariousness of so many of these financial institutions, said Jesse Brill, an outspoken pay critic who is the chairman of CompensationStandards.com, a research firm in California. Its troublesome that the old ways are so engrained that it is very hard for them to shed them.

The report does not include certain other highly paid employees, like brokers who are paid on commission.

The report also does not include some bank subsidiaries, like the Phibro commodities trading unit at Citigroup, where one trader stands to collect $100 million for his work last year.