Public openness v personal privacy
In 2009 New York's schools employed two people called David Cameron. One of them was paid $38,698, the other made $67,406.
I know this because it's publicly available information. The David Camerons are just two of the 1.5 million public employees in New York state - from school bus drivers to secretaries - whose salary details are accessible in searchable databases obtained via FOI and posted online by the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a free enterprise lobby group.
The state of Idaho doesn't seem to employ anyone called David Cameron, but it has lots of staff with the surname Cameron - from a custodian (caretaker) paid $8.46 an hour to a research engineer on $40.36 an hour. Again their pay rates, along with those of Idaho's public employees with other names, were obtained from public authorities and can be found at the website of a local organisation, Our Idaho.
Similar sites have caused controversy in some parts of the US, but their existence illustrates how strikingly different cultural attitudes to personal privacy can be found in different countries. To many people in Britain it would be an unjustified intrusion into the personal circumstances of ordinary rank-and-file public sector workers.
The availability of this data for all state employees of whatever status certainly goes well beyond the proposals announced on Friday by David Cameron (the leader of the Conservative Party, not one of the New York school pair).
As part of a drive towards greater openness in local government, he wants councils to have to reveal the name, post and remuneration of all staff earning over £58,500 annually. Labour's policy is to introduce this requirement just for those paid over £150,000.
Where to draw the line between personal privacy and transparency in public finances can be a difficult matter. And there are other countries which go much further than even the US does.
In Norway, people's tax payments are publicly available - not only for public employees, but everyone. So if for example you go to the search facility set up by the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, you can find out that there are six Norwegian taxpayers named David Cameron and you can discover their annual income, tax paid and wealth.
A Norwegian journalist once told me that it's accepted in Norway you have a right to know what your neighbours are paying in tax, so that you can check they're contributing their fair share towards public funds.
However, this is a level of openness in public finances and parallel intrusion into private finances which is way beyond anything David Cameron or any other British politician is likely to suggest (and I wonder what Lord Ashcroft would make of it?).
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I think it's perfectly acceptable. If the Government takes 35% of my annual income, then common law states that a service must be rendered.
In this case, the service rendered is the payment of the wages of a hardworking public sector employee.
Is there any reason why I should not be made aware of exactly what is being paid?
Transparency? I wonder what Lakshmi Mittal, Lord Paul and Lord Cohen would make of it)
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I think I would support a change to full openness in the UK. Certainly full openness in income, wealth and tax-paid. One of the major problems we have in our society stems from this secrecy. It causes almost everyone to exaggerate either their wealth or their poverty. These are simply facts and I believe that on balance our society is made the poorer and more fractured by these petty lies and this leads to much criminality.
However given that most public databases are full of garbage there should also be a right to have the correct information held on these databases. I recall tackling the Chairman of the Joint Human Rights Committee in the UK Parliament on this and it was his opinion that it was NOT a human right to have accurate information held on one - I found this astonishing, but quite typical of the inability of our legislators to understand the consequence of inaccurate information on databases.
I further proposed at the time that data subjects for the ID Card system should be able to amend their data without let or hindrance so that they could be who they chose to be. The reason for this is that this is the only practical way to keep the data accurate at a sensible cost. If the tax and pay data was to be published then everyone should also have the right to put down what they wanted to without any hindrance!
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My father was a senior civil servant, and his pay to the penny was printed in Vacher's Parliamentary Companion next to his name. But he was extremely reticent to discuss his actual finances, deeming them to be private. During student years, I did his tax return for him and he was insistent on that point.
That seems to me a happy medium - the salary for his position being public knowledge (especially as it was paid out of the public purse).
As a database programmer myself, I know that data integrity is paramount - 'Garbage in, garbage out' as we say - and the Data Protection Act 1998 provides that a 'data subject' has the right to know what is held about them and to require the correction of errors. However, at the moment it is up to said data subject to ask - perhaps governmental busibodies would be more reluctant to hold data if they had to make an annual return to each data subject showing what information they hold and why it is still necessary for it to be held. An audit trail of all changes is also a basic requirement, who authorised the change and why.
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The individual salaries are one thing. More important are the internal budgets and the services contracted out by government departments.
Every government department should publish a full breakdown of all its costs and all its contracts. It is appalling that contracts with the likes of Fujitsu, HP, Accenture etc can be hidden and called 'commercially confidential.' It is taxpayers' money; why should there be anything confidential about the way our money is spent?
My experience is that government procurement departments are staffed by honest people, but they work within a poor set of rules. The rules favour enormous companies that charge a fortune. Hiding the facts about the contracts those companies sign simply adds to the costs that all taxpayers face. Anyone pleased to pay £1000 per day for business consultants 2 years out of university? For a project with slightly muddled goals? Where decisions don't get taken for months at a time? Hiding the facts about costs, aims and results allows poor managers to hide their blushes. Every one of us should be able to see the cost structures of every government department. If we could, costs would drop and performance would improve rapidly.
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I disagree with both Mr. Cameron and Mr. Brown.
I believe that all governmental employees, at all levels, should reveal the name, the post and the remuneration. Part of my frame of reference is – what if a civil clerk doing filing is being paid $190,000/year? Is this not something to be questioned? I mean what is s/he filing, anthrax-exposed documentation?
A public servant is just that: a PUBLIC SERVANT, and the public has the right to know what is being paid for each and every position – whether the individual is permanent or temporary, eligible for bonus payment, etc. in short the public has the right to know anything and everything about the position, its encumbent and how its encumbent came to be the encumbent.
In fact I’ll go as far as to agree with Norway: people's tax payments are publicly available - not only for public employees, but everyone.
I don’t know what Norway uses this date for, except to satify maybe to satisfy curioisty, but I can imagine many persons be reported for tax evasion. I like what that Norwegian journalistsaid - you have a right to know what your neighbours are paying in tax, so that you can check they're contributing their fair share towards public funds.
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Never mind individuals, I want to see the proper audited accounts for public funds - how else can we ensure that we get value for money for all that tax we give the state, if we do not know precisely how much has come in and what it all has been spent on.
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Accurate pay information is useful for planning careers. It can help inform a decision about degree choice or whether to jump horses in mid-career. So it should improve the country's fairness and economic efficiency.
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as a public sector worker i dont feel its nessary to publish this information for everyone in the public sector. the standard pay scales are available online so work it out from there.
apart from anything else its a complete waste of time 90% of workers bottom rung just like me and on less than 20k by a considerable margin.
its once you get to the 40k + managers is where the money is wasted on incompetant morons
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Agree with JackTheLad5 (@8). The vast majority of public sector workers are paid according to published pay-scales, so why bother disclosing the pay of individuals? It doesn't achieve anything.
I'd be far more impressed if Cameron published the tax status and earnings of all his peers, contributors and MPs before barging into the public sector. Get your own house in order first, Dave.
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Martin,
As this is vaunted as the BBC's FOI blog, are there any hopes of a thread on the BBC's own denial of the SNP FOI request concerning the UK-wide broadcasting of the "Leaders' debates"?
When the planned debates themselves seem to break both OfCom guidelines on the six UK major parties (Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrats, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Democratic Unionist, SDLP, Sinn Fein and Ulster Unionist) as confirmed in HoC library Standard Note PC/03354 and the BBC's own latest Election Guidelines 2010 where the PDF tells us that the BBC "are aware of the different political structures in the four nations of the United Kingdom and that they are reflected in the election coverage of each nation. Programmes shown across the UK should also take this into account".
When both Scotland's "quality" newspapers - the Herald and the Scotsman - are reporting the issue, is it not strange that this website's UK Politics and Scotland politics pages continue to ignore it?
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Ooops - for six read nine in my previous post.
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In case you were going first, there's was a Senior Team Counsel in the New York State Assembly who earned $84,999 in 2008 called Marty Rosenbaum.
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I notice that commenters have not seen fit to disclose their own total income since they are so curious about other peoples'. Mine was £35K. All about £7.5K came from state funds in form of the OAP and nn annuity (they are almost always invested in Government Bonds.) The major amount came form a pension payment from a state contributory scheme. Thee age structure of the members makes it self financing but obviously the state paid the employer contribution though my working life.
What more would you like to know?
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citizens want information on public employees yet know nothing about tax dollars used for bonuses for bankers. How much of that was public funds...certainly would exceed any public salary. But they cook the books and can hide money so well how would one find out. Let's have greater honesty in this dishonest world. How about government contractors: How much salary is acceptable when they do a job that is also a job that could be done by a public employee? The waste is at so many levels picking one seems a bit petty. More could be told by publishing contributions from banking and financial services to political interest.
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@ 4, TransparencyatWork hit the nail on the head.
What we need is complete information on how the public sector spends our money. Otherwise, there is no motivation for them to reduce costs. In fact, there is every incentive to increase them: the bigger the budget, the bigger and more prestigious their jobs. Individual salaries or tax contributions are rather a minor aspect.
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Really a fascinating article (making me quite glad my name is not David Cameron!) I think there is a fine line for public figures between privacy and accountability. At least governance with respect to disclosure is respected (in most cases) in the first world.
In countries like South Africa however, certain public figures use the defense of privacy to avoid necessary disclosure. Politicians as high as the country president, Jacob Zuma and popular youth leaders like Julius Malema have been involved in allegedly dodgy activity including assignment of state tenders to personal companies and the like. Privacy seems to be an adequate get-out-of-jail-free card when it really shouldn't be.
Forcing public disclosure of ownership, wealth, income and tax for all state officials I believe would certainly go a long way to preventing corruption. It's certainly empirically evident in Norway (I knew corruption was low there but had no idea that the level of disclosure was so high until I read this post!)
@14 ghostofsichuan - point taken about providing information to the public that don't have the capacity to understand the bigger picture. But at least if the information was available sensible analysts have the data available to educate the public.
Toonman [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
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We could follow the model of Norway and all know exactly how much income our neighbours have. The advantage is presumably to ensure that tax is properly paid and accounted for. The downside is that this potentially conflicts with other fundamental rights - in this case the right to respect for private and family life enshrined in the Human Rights Act. Or don't we care about that provided that we know where our taxes are going?
This discussion reflects the continual tension between law enforcement and privacy - the Information Commissioner's website (http://www.ico.gov.uk/) is full of guidance showing how to find a suitable balance to questions of this kind. But as they say "Freedom is not free". You can use freedom of information rules to catch out tax avoiders/corrupt officials, but at the expense of everyone else living a slightly less private, more oppressive existence.
In my opinion there is no more justification in publishing individual salaries that there is in publishing their medical data. Information of this kind could usually be published in aggregated or anonymised form unless there are compelling public interest reasons in disclosing it (as determined by a court of law, rather than journalist or civil servant).
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