This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
I received an email the other day from someone who wanted to let me know the Orem salary database needed updating.
"Please update the City of Orem salary information because it is 2 years old," the person wrote. "They are now in Fiscal Year 2014."
The data up there at this time is for the 2012 fiscal year, which began July 1, 2011 and ended June 30, 2012. I will be posting the 2013 fiscal year data shortly.
But I can't get to the fiscal year 2014 salary data because, technically, it doesn't exist yet.
Yes, government agencies have already figured out how much they will spend on each employee's salary and benefits package for the coming fiscal year. But, that money hasn't been paid out yet.
I field enough complaints from people who don't understand that we initially show gross compensation, which is salary plus benefits. Publishing what someone might earn in the coming year is not going to make many people happy.
Let's say Utah's Right posted that an employee was making $100,000 in salary in the 2014 fiscal year, but the employee got fired two days into the year. While that money was budgeted for him, it's not what he was paid, which would make that posting erroneous, as well as make this guy upset when he gets people asking about the 100 grand he was supposedly paid.
In the coming weeks, utahsright,com's salary databases will be updated to show the 2013 data — at least for the agencies that are willing to share that data.