Government Technology - July 2008 - (Page 26)

Government almost is forced to deal with these issues, whether they are real or not, if they are perceived by the public. If you don’t deal with them and something does happen, you’re going to be held to blame.” Should Pay Be Public? Some online public information doesn’t endanger citizens as much as embarrass them. How would you like all of your friends knowing how much money you make? Some states provide searchable databases that let citizens enter state worker names and see those workers’ salaries. Many newspapers create the same types of databases, occasionally angering state workers. California state employees recently ﬂooded The Sacramento Bee with e-mails protesting its state employee salary database, according to the newspaper. The Bee said it merely published public information. In the past, however, people needing that information had to do leg work to get it. Many argue this ensured that it was mostly people using the information for ofﬁcial, legitimate purposes accessing it. Now anyone can easily get the information via the Web with searchable databases. Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, advocates a compromise. “The better approach is to provide information by the job title as opposed to by a particular name. The net effect of that would be, presumably, the only people you would be able to identify by salary would be top-level individuals where there only was one person in that particular job description,” Stephens said. Does the public have any reasonable interest in knowing individual government worker salaries? What if a customer service representative at the department of motor vehicles treats you horribly? Do you not have a right to ﬁnd out exactly how much of your taxes pay that person to treat you that way? Stephens said that interest would be irrelevant to the problem. He said you should focus on contacting the employee’s supervisor. “I don’t care if they’re underpaid or overpaid, they still should be treating you properly,” Stephens said. “It seems to be more a matter of your curiosity. You don’t like this person and the way they’ve treated you, so you want to ﬁnd out how much they’re making.” The California First Amendment Coalition supports publishing individual state worker names with salaries to help expose nepotism, said Peter Scheer, executive director of the coalition. Enabling Researchers The obvious question is why agencies didn’t redact SSNs from online public documents in the first place. Starting in the ’90s, lenders often required borrowers to include SSNs on UCC forms, said Young. UCC researchers argued SSNs ensured research accuracy and timeliness. For example, if a researcher looked up a man named Kevin Stone and found 10 people with that name, narrowing by SSN would have been easier than searching with other pieces of information. Agencies wanted those researchers to use the online databases, rather than visiting offices in person, so they kept the numbers in the online documents. Before the California Secretary of State’s Office awarded its redaction contract, it redacted by hand all but the last four digits of SSNs to appease UCC researchers. Then the winning redaction vendor redacted all of the digits. If an identity thief has the birth date, he or she could use an algorithm to reconstruct the entire number using only the last four digits, said Carol Foglesong, assistant comptroller of Orange County, Fla., and president of the Property Records Industry Association. According to Mark Mishoe, chief deputy of the Oklahoma County, Okla., Clerk’s Office, the oil and gas industry pleaded with the office to keep SSNs online. He said oil and gas mineral interest records contained less information than normal land records. Researchers of these records claimed SSNs were often the only information enabling them to verify interest ownership. Nevertheless, the Clerk’s Office redacted the SSNs in 2007. Pescatore rejects the notion that publishing SSNs to accommodate researchers was ever a reasonable policy. “Should we really endanger the citizens’ information to make it easier for the researchers?” said Pescatore. By 2005, SSNs nearly vanished from incoming UCC documents in Maryland, according to Young. He said Maryland typically gets JULY_08 The Sacramento Bee’s state worker salary database angered many California workers. However, Iowa and Georgia have provided individual employee salaries online for years with little objection from workers. Iowa began printing individual state worker salaries in 1938. “Honestly I think we’re so used to having it out there. Sometimes employees are sensitive about it, but it has been a precedent for so long that no one really has anything to say that would change it,” said Robert Bailey, communications director of the Iowa Department of Administrative Services. The Iowa database doesn’t exempt any workers. “We don’t even make conﬁdentiality an issue, even if someone is an undercover police ofﬁcer, unless it’s written in the code, and it’s not at this point. If you’re ‘Joe Schmo’ and you’re an undercover cop, you’re listed just like anyone else,” Bailey said. Georgia implemented its database in 2003 to save costs from printing the information into sets of volumes. Each set cost $60 to print, said Russell Hinton, state auditor of Georgia’s Department of Audits and Accounts. “We would have employees coming into our ofﬁce to get a set of the volumes, look up what the person sitting next to them was making, and then get mad and throw the books in the trash can,” Hinton said. “It’s one of the most popular documents that our ofﬁce issues. A lot of it is other employees measuring their level of achievement against others within their departments.” Bailey said he rarely hears employee complaints about friends viewing their salaries. “It’s in the spirit of keeping some sort of transparency with how government’s working,” he said. “We tend to believe in that here.” 26 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - July 2008

Government Technology - July 2008 Point of View The Last Mile Big Picture On the Scene Four Questions for ... Generation 2.0 at Work Dangerous Convenience Tainted Justice? Are You Ready? E-Discovery Basics Smart Docs Advanced Math Online Video Blues Spectrum Personal Computing Products signal:noise

Government Technology - July 2008

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