Miscellaneous

Find Government Employees and Salaries

By PI Magazine (Tamara Thompson and Rosemarie Mesis)

In the past few years, general circulation newspapers have furthered the cause of government transparency by providing searchable databases of government employees and their salaries. Although these are federal, state, county and municipal government public records the corresponding government agencies have not made these available at their Web sites. Government agency Web sites sometimes post a staff list or employee directory — not salaries — with name, telephone number and email. Often, school districts don’t list staff beyond those in the top level administration, but school sites that have their own Web pages may have a staff and faculty directory with names of administrators and teachers. An example of a very flexible school staff and teacher directory is hosted by the Ventura County Office of Education. Search by district, school or employee last name to find the district, school site, job title and phone number (Internet Explorer, only). I?ve endeavored to compile links to all of the government pay databases hosted at newspaper sites on a page called Government Pay.

The disadvantage of the separate databases is you have to know which one to search in order to verify your subject?s employment. The beta site, myDanwei, is a nascent attempt at a cross-agency compilation of government employee names, salaries, job titles and departments. Select the link,
National public employee salary database, to search by partial name, county, state, agency or institution. There?s only one search box, but you can enter a combination of keywords. The words (without quotation marks) ?physician santa clara? will return a list of doctors who work for the County of Santa Clara, California. The extent of the coverage becomes apparent with various queries. The keywords ?Weir Idaho? doesn?t return any records, but ?Weir Washington? results in a handful of names from Washington State agencies. Just enter a state name into the search box to find out if any data is included from that location and from which government departments.

MyDanwei doesn?t identify its sources and this description of the utility isn?t very enlightening.

MyDanwei, Inc. is a pioneer of developing the next generation organization, people, salary, and job information searching and data mining platforms. We are inspired to provide our users with easy and accurate information about a person or an organization, such as salary, education background, past employments, key employees, job positions, etc. Besides one of the most comprehensive databases with millions of records of organization, people, salary, and jobs, our website also features state-of-the-art user interface, where everyone can freely add, edit, discuss, tag, and rate all records about people and organizations around the globe.

The search box on the myDanwei home page can be used to access minimal information on some private and public companies. Again, the source and completeness of the data is not identified. These are leads, not confirmations!

How does this site compare with the newspaper government employee databases?

Full post as published by PI buzz on November 23, 2008 (boomark / email).