Editorial | The bogeyman of transparency

If the finance ministry’s argument were taken to its logical conclusion, on the basis of draft policy documents, Nigel Clarke committed Jamaica’s taxpayers to paying public sector workers J$116.2 billion, or 52 per cent more in wages this fiscal year than in 2021/2022.

That, if it were the case, would hardly be a prudent exercise of fiduciary responsibility, which wouldn’t be expected to be the norm for Dr Clarke and which he wouldn’t countenance elsewhere in the public sector.

This issue, and its clarification, commands even greater public interest given that these salary increases included – until he declined to accept it because of a public revolt of its size – a more than 200 per cent jump in Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ pay and awards in similar ranges to other Cabinet ministers and members of parliament.

Whether government workers and MPs deserve the hikes as part of a public sector job reclassification exercise – this newspaper has long held that parliamentarians were woefully underpaid – is beyond the point. It is ludicrous that the Government is hiding not only the recommendations that informed the new salary structures, but the guidelines it gave to the consultants who were asked to assess the equivalence of jobs in the public sector and to shape the salary bands within which the posts would fall.

But worse is the flaccidity of the argument the finance ministry offered to this newspaper for keeping that information secret in response to its access to information request for the reports furnished by the consulting firm, EY (formerly Ernst and Young) on the job reclassification project and the terms of reference within which it operated: that “... projects are not yet finished, and as such, all reports are still being treated as draft documents”.

The reclassification exercise is aimed, in part, at making public sector salaries more competitive, thus increasing its ability to retain talent, which should lead to improved efficiency and better service delivery. The process has slashed the previous 325 public sector salary scales to 16, while most of the 185 allowances have been rolled into taxable income.

Dr Clarke has reported that over the three-year adjustment, no public employee’s salary increase will be less than 20 per cent. For many, he said, the increases will be multiples of that.

NO TRANSPARENT ACCOUNTING

While the implemented adjustments were agreed by a raft of trade unions and staff associations, there is no transparent accounting for these contracts. Neither has the public been told what were the matrices used by EY to determine how one public sector job is priced against the other and what are to be the benchmarks for measuring the success of an enterprise that will cause the government’s employee compensation bill to jump by 81 per cent over the six fiscal years, to 2026/2027.

That information ought to be neither classified nor secret. Indeed, in December 2019, shortly after Dr Clarke disclosed the agreement with EY for its help in sorting out the government’s Byzantine pay structure, The Gleaner asked for better particulars on the terms of reference.

We wanted to know if EY’s job included advising on the “the optimum size of the public sector, even though that, ultimately, is determined by what is expected of the State, which, in part, is a political decision informed by philosophy and ideological disposition”.

Against that backdrop and the backlash over the big increases in politicians’ salaries, The Gleaner will perhaps seem prescient when it said in 2019: “With regard to EY pronouncing on members of parliament pay, the terms of reference for this analysis are important and ought to be public, given that the job of a parliamentarian, or the expectation thereof, is not readily, or easily, related to those of other public servants, which raises the question of comparable bands in which parliamentarians would fall.”

There was nothing particularly far-sighted – and certainly nothing oracular – about those observations. They are the obvious expectations of public officials in their conduct of the people’s business in a liberal democracy, especially with a government that values transparency. Which is a principle that this newspaper associates with Dr Clarke, but from which he sometimes departs, such as in his defence of the central bank’s refusal to disclose the cost of procuring the new currency notes that are now being circulated – and lately his ministry’s denial flat of our request for background documents on the salary reclassification project.

Even if by way of some contorted logic the finance ministry can make a case for withholding the reports and recommendations of an outside consultant – not civil service advisers – it is nothing short of fantastical that it can conjure an argument for denying the public the terms of reference that guided EY’s work. Indeed, information in a procurement document for a job such as EY was asked to do would be expected to largely mirror the project’s terms of reference.

But in cultures where secrecy is the default, any blip of transparency is perceived to be, and transposed into, dangerous spectres that are to be avoided at all costs. Which, unfortunately, seems to be the case at the finance ministry. At least in this matter.