Another step for government transparency

Have you ever wondered which state employee receives the most compensation? (Orlando George with $454,230 in 2010…more than two and a half times what the Governor is paid. George has been paid more than $1.6 million over the past four years.) What about use of overtime and other pay by state employees? (A staff person in Health and Social Services had a salary of $58,000 in 2010 and earned an additional $132,000 in overtime and other pay.) Are you surprised that the University of Delaware received $10,000,000 as a vendor to the Delaware Department of Education in 2010? Do you know what your legislator is being paid? Thanks to the generous support of its donors, all this and more is available to any citizen as the Caesar Rodney Institute launches its Transparent Delaware website (www.transparentdelaware.org). Transparent Delaware has the most recently available (2010) payroll and vendor data for the state of Delaware. The payroll data has records for each individual employee together with their regular pay, overtime pay and “other” pay. “Other” pay is a catch all for almost 100 different sources of compensation, the most common of which are holiday pay, shift differential, call back pay, and pay for extra responsibilities such as coaching or sponsoring a club. The vendor data lists every individual payment made to any vendor during the past seven fiscal years. The website software allows visitors to examine the payroll and vendor data by branch of government or department or even agency, to track trends in the expenditures, to sort on any data field, to print tables, and to extract the data tables into an EXCEL file. Good government is transparent government. CRI hopes that this additional transparency tool will improve government efficiency and give citizens greater insights into how their tax dollars are being used. Please visit Transparent Delaware and do your own analysis of our state government’s spending. Dr. John E. Stapleford, Director Center for Economic Policy and Analysis

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