Amid Tighter Scrutiny of Public Salaries, Transparency Becomes the Word of the Day
The recent news about hugely exorbitant salaries paid to top officials of the low-income city of Bell, Calif, has shined a light on the way cities, counties and public agencies determine and report how much they pay their public servants. At the same time, more than a dozen cities and counties have implemented a new software program developed by the Waters Consulting Group that enables officials to map the total value of their employees’ salary and benefits internally and against similar positions, and to cost-effectively make that information readily and easily available for a range of planning, budgeting and reporting needs.
Dallas, TX (PRWEB) August 21, 2010
The recent news about hugely exorbitant salaries paid to top officials of the low-income city of Bell, Calif. – including $800,000 a year to the city manager – has shined a light on the way cities, counties and public agencies nationwide determine and report how much they pay their public servants.
“The amazing thing here – or at least one of the amazing things – is that only a select few insiders knew what these officials were paying themselves, and outsiders had no way of knowing how the pay was determined or what it was based on,” said Rollie Waters, founder of The Waters Consulting Group, Inc., which provides human resources and compensation consulting and solutions to government jurisdictions, education agencies and professional associations.
At the same time, more than a dozen cities and counties have implemented a new software program developed by the Waters Consulting Group (www. watersconsulting. com) that enables officials to map the total value of their employees’ salary and benefits internally and against similar positions, and to cost-effectively make that information readily and easily available for a range of planning, budgeting and reporting needs.
The program has also caught the attention of Karen Thoreson, president and chief executive officer for the Phoenix-based Alliance for Innovation, an international think tank for local governments.
“It is a system that really lets local governments understand their overall compensation plan much faster and easier than before, and it can make that information completely accessible,” Thoreson said.
The salary and benefits planning software platform developed by the Waters Consulting Group opens up detailed, factual total compensation data to government leadership as well as managers, rather than keeping it in the hands of consultants or human resource specialists. (Total compensation is the total monetary value of an employee’s salary plus benefits.)
Traditionally, when a jurisdiction or agency conducts compensation planning, it contracts the work to an outside consultant, such as Waters’ firm, or it relies on highly trained, in-house compensation specialists, who usually are only on staff at the largest organizations. If a smaller entity or organization performs compensation planning in-house, it usually reviews base pay and tends to rely only on market comparisons. Also, staffs at smaller organizations often lack the training to ensure the data they collect accurately reflects their entity’s unique set of demographics, required skill levels, population and other variables that can affect pay and benefits comparisons.
“At best, compensation data traditionally resides only with the people in HR,” the Alliance for Innovation’s Thoreson said.
In fact, it was a complaint from a taxpayer in the small, low-income suburb of Bell to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office that spurred an investigation into the fat salaries the town officials were paying themselves. The median household income in Bell is under $30,000. The reported salaries for the city’s three other top officials were $787,637 for the chief administrative officer, $457,000 for the police chief and $376,288 for the assistant city manager.
“Obviously, this is an extreme case,” Waters said. “But the principle is the same: Where do the numbers come from that determine how much public officials get paid? Taxpayers and elected officials are going to be asking this question more loudly now.”
On the other hand, the software program developed by the Waters Consulting Group gathers all of the necessary data from each client, evaluates how that client is distributing pay among all of its jobs based on different skill requirements, and then compares the compensation to relevant market data. The result is that managers and leadership can identify any unfair or extreme pay levels and decide how – or whether – they need to be adjusted. The platform also sorts the data by myriad factors (such as job code, budget fund, years of experience, geography and size of population served). It can also be used to conduct federal and state audits to comply with the Fair Pay Act.
“This program gives you the ability to go deep into your data and identify areas of compensation where, statistically, you may have inconsistencies, and gives you the opportunity to ask questions about why the pay is set that way and how you want to follow up,” said Monte Mercer, deputy executive director of the North Central Texas Council of Governments, a 350-employee association of government agencies in 16 counties surrounding the Dallas-Fort Worth area. “We didn’t have that ability before.”
“It also gives you the ability to do almost any kind of ‘what-if’ scenario to see the impacts of any suggested pay modifications throughout my organization, and that’s a big deal,” Mercer said.
The platform makes all of the data available to the client as a Web-based program, as software as a service (SaaS), accessible through any Internet browser. This means the user does not need to be a compensation guru, nor does a client need to download any extra software or pay for any computer hardware or IT support to access and run the program from any computer with an Internet browser.
Jefferson County, Colo., for example, recently completed its first in-depth compensation plan for its nearly 3,000 full-time employees as the result of a contract with the consulting arm of the Waters Consulting Group. Now, Jefferson County, in the foothills west of Denver, is hoping the new software solution from the Waters Consulting Group will serve three goals, said Jennifer Fairweather, the county’s director of human resources.
First, she expects the new program to help Jefferson County keep its compensation plan up to date – to have the mountain of data it is using to benchmark its pay and benefits easily updated against national and local data at least annually. Second, Fairweather is hoping the system will give her the ability to automatically assess the immediate financial impact of any adjustments or changes to the employee pay structure or benefits and report that information to budget planners.
Finally, Fairweather said, the new program will save Jefferson County money, because it won’t need to rely on major outside consulting contracts that are time consuming and costly to handle compensation planning and auditing.
“We’ll be able to have the reports we need to help employees better understand how their pay and compensation are determined, and for executive leadership to better understand the ramifications of their decisions relative to our budgets and the market, and save us money doing all of that,” Fairweather said.
Because the Waters Consulting Group is offering the program as software as a service, clients will pay an initial fee to sign up and then a monthly usage fee based on the number of employees, Waters said. The fees are fixed for the client regardless of how much they use the system.
Carrollton, Texas, near Dallas, is also using the Waters Consulting Group program. City Manager Leonard Martin sees potential in making salary and benefit decisions more transparent – with his own constituents and even among municipalities – to help keep salaries in line and make sense.
“This is going to be a great opportunity if we can begin to get more cities participating and we can really assess from one to the other who is paying how much for what jobs, with what skill sets – and we can stop competing with each other, or at least have the data we need to show why we pay what we pay,” Martin said. “And because it’s web-based and not bringing in a consultant, the cost-saving benefits of this are tremendous.”
About the Waters Consulting Group
Since 1988, The Waters Consulting Group, Inc., www. watersconsulting. com, has built a highly successful practice providing state of the art and innovative solutions in the human resources arena to a broad range of clients that include some of the nation’s largest local governments as well as small to mid-sized cities and counties. Its clients also include various state agencies, school districts and professional associations, as well as private-sector clients in major industries including transportation, insurance, health care and retail. Based in Dallas, Texas, with regional offices in Seattle, Washington; Cleveland, Ohio; and Austin, Texas, the Waters Consulting Group is strategically located to serve a nation-wide client base.
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