Transparency and openness in government spending is crucial in an open society as it reinforces our system of checks and balances. When citizens know how, where, and why their tax dollars are being spent they are far better able to hold government accountable and demand changes. Government becomes more responsive to constituent's concerns, thus bolstering public confidence, promoting fiscal responsibility, and reducing the prospects of waste, fraud, and abuse.
Over the last few years state governments across the country have been creating entirely new web portals dedicated to spending transparency, listing state employee salaries, providing state operating budgets and the like. In addition, independent organizations have jumped on the transparency bandwagon, often times filling the void in states that do not yet have official government transparency sites. They attempt to organize financial information into a user friendly and searchable format.
The Ohio-based Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions has its own searchable database of state employee, teacher and lobbyist salary information. This week the Institute added the following colleges and universities to its "Higher Ed" searchable data tool:
Bowling Green State University (2009 & 2010)
Cleveland State University (2009 & 2010)
Kent State University (2009 & 2010)
Miami University (2009 & 2010)
Ohio University (2009 & 2010)
Shawnee State (2009 & 2010)
The Ohio State University (2009)
University of Akron (2009 & 2010)
University of Cincinnati (2009 & 2010)
University of Toledo (2009)
The new data includes the salary and estimated pension data for over 59,000 public higher education employees in Ohio, including the 4,496 employees earning $100,000 or more. Based on the current pension formula, Buckeye estimates yearly pension payout for these employees would total $428,530,218.50 and a lifetime payout total of $9,680,497,636.00 for an eighteen-year retirement. The total payroll for the ten schools based on the latest year data totaled $3,002,544,981.
Ohio taxpayers deserve to know what higher education is costing them and judge the overall value of the state’s public schools. The website has received much fanfare since its launch on April 30, 2010. According the Institute, over 99,500 visitors from 426 Ohio cities have spent over 10,500 hours on the website doing more than 732,000 searches.