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The
Columbus Dispatch...
Editorial: Apples to
Apples
Friday, February 25, 2011
For months, Ohioans have heard the debate over whether government
employees are overpaid compared with the private sector.
State Auditor Dave Yost says he plans to address the issue in
performance audits his office will conduct of state agencies and local
governments.
If he can deliver a straight answer, free of ideological spin, he’ll
bring significant added value to those audits.
As state leaders struggle to bring public-employee pay and benefits in
line with those of private-sector workers, reliable comparisons would
be invaluable. While some public positions, such as police officer and
firefighter, have no exact private-sector counterpart, many jobs do,
and policy-makers need to know how compensation compares.
While public-sector benefits clearly are superior in several ways,
reports by ideologically based think tanks offer conflicting and
confusing statistics about pay rates. The free-market-oriented Buckeye
Institute for Public Policy Solutions reported that public-sector
workers have considerably higher pay. The liberal Economic Policy
Institute’s study concluded the opposite: that Ohio public employees
earn less per year than comparable private-sector workers.
As with any complex question, two seemingly contradictory answers both
can be technically correct, depending on what statistics are compared.
Yost figures neither of the think-tank reports is definitive, because
each tries to provide a general answer covering a broad range of public
agencies and job types.
In performance audits of state agencies, he says, he’ll make much
narrower comparisons of specific job types. Some categories of state
workers are likely to have higher pay than private-sector counterparts;
for others, the opposite might be true.
Ohioans will expect Yost to approach the pay comparisons without
predisposition, as the auditor is expected to do with any investigation
of a government entity.
The Ohio Lottery Commission under Democratic former Gov. Ted Strickland
chafed last year at plans by then-auditor, Republican Mary Taylor, to
conduct a performance audit of the agency.
Taylor, who was running for lieutenant governor at the time, and who
might have made political hay with such a review, enhanced her
credibility by delivering a clinical, fair assessment that gave lottery
operations generally high marks.
Some agencies and local governments might not welcome the extra
scrutiny of a public-private pay comparison. Yost said deciding what to
cover in an audit “is a collaborative process” with the entity being
audited, but he should push to include the pay comparison.
One purpose of such audits is to identify ways the organization could
operate more efficiently.
Given that the bulk of most government budgets is payroll, few
operational details are more important than setting appropriate
compensation.
Read it at the Dispatch
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