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Major changes on the way

BY Cynthia lee
Today Staff Writer

Four days after UC was harshly reprimanded by an independent task force for numerous failures regarding compensation, President Robert C. Dynes took the first steps toward implementing some of its recommendations.

“I have heard the task force loud and clear: Major change is required, and we need to begin implementing that change immediately,” Dynes said April 17.

As part of the plan to improve transparency, disclosure and compliance, Dynes’ office will be developing protocols to release online annual reports of the base salaries for all UC employees.

In addition, all employees will be required to undergo ethics training, which will cover, among other things, UC’s whistleblower programs and anti-retaliation policies. The training required for senior managers will be more extensive, with a focus on compliance.

“These represent just the beginning of a long process for the UC to improve its compensation policies and practices,” said Dynes. “As the task force stated so clearly and well, the challenges laid out in its report will require several years to complete. But the time to start is now.”

While praising Dynes’ swift response, UCLA Academic Senate chair Adrienne Lavine said posting employees’ base salaries may not go far enough since other forms of compensation, such as off-scale salaries, are a legitimate part of faculty compensation. Medical school faculty have a completely different compensation plan, she said.

“If we are to regain the public trust, it’s important that we are very forthright about our compensation practices,” Lavine said. Not reporting total cash compensation, she said, “puts us right back in the same place,” leaving UC open to public criticism again.

David Miller, UC staff adviser to the regents and a manager of client services at UCLA, said Dynes’ response was welcome, but “only a start,” since there are three audit reports coming. “We’ll need to see the outcome of those audits to be able to comprehensively focus on all the issues,” Miller said, but he did “commend the president for acknowledging the need for transparency and also the importance of expanding ethics training for all levels of university staff.”

Staff input, he continued, will be critical. Among those Dynes is naming to a new, high-level committee to implement reform are regents, chancellors, faculty and campus and systemwide staff.

The report, released April 13 by the regent-appointed task force, was stinging in its rebuke of UC for its failure to be accountable to the public, to provide full and timely compensation information and to follow its own policies established in 1992 in the wake of an earlier controversy over executive salaries.

“Some of these current problems would not have occurred, we believe, if these policies and reforms had been followed and enforced,” said former California State Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg, who co-chaired the task force with Regent Joanne C. Kozberg.

So many exceptions to the rules were granted that compliance became a voluntary matter, and UC policies were simply ignored or circumvented, Kozberg said. “At best, they were often treated as a guideline.” The compensation policies themselves are confusing, overlapping, duplicative and sometimes conflicting, the task force found.

Its report also notes that UC employees, by and large, are not overpaid.

“It’s not the compensation level per se” that is troubling, said Hertzberg, “but the workarounds and nondisclosures that have gotten this university into this present mess.”

Hertzberg said the task force made clear that, above all, UC
must remain competitive. “The UC is the number-one rated public university in the world. … None of this will mean anything unless we stay on top.”