Dive Brief:
- For more government transparency, Connecticut will make all state employee pay data updated and accessible to the public on a new website called OpenPayroll, reports the Hartford Courant.
- OpenPayroll is an expansion of OpenConnecticut, the state comptroller’s website. The expansion will make state pay data available in real time. Until now, online payroll data was only updated yearly on the transparency.ct.gov website, which is managed by the legislature’s Office of Fiscal Analysis.
- State workers’ compensation, including pay data from state universities, will be updated every two weeks. OpenPayroll will break out base wages from overtime pay.
Dive Insight:
The days of keeping state wages secret from the public are gone with websites such as OpenPayroll. Connecticut took a major step in letting the state’s tax payers know how their money is being spent, even if state workers might prefer to keep their earnings private.
It also reflects a recent trend favoring pay transparency as a way to ensure equality in the workplace. While this site only reflects state employees' pay, recent EEOC pushes for changes to the EEO-1 may call for private employers across the nation to provide pay data as well as gender and ethnicity data. Basically: this type of transparency likely won't be going away.
