As part of a scheduled follow-up, UC staff leadership worked through a 22-point checklist of recommendations made three years earlier by the Task Force on UC Compensation, Accountability and Transparency, which had been formed by the Regents in response to criticisms about the university system's compensation policies.
"Transparency and accountability for me are two issues critical to university governance," President Mark G. Yudof told the task force, which met at UCLA. "We in higher education need not only adjust to them, but to embrace them. Transparency isn't always easy. We are perhaps better at disclosure than we are at explaining ourselves to the public and the media. We may not like the headlines; but we will not water down or abandon transparency.
"We do this because as a public institution, it's the right thing to do."
In December 2005 then-Chairman of the Board of Regents Gerald Parsky appointed the task force to "conduct an independent review of the university's policies and practices on compensation for faculty and senior managers and on the release of public information regarding compensation and related matters, and to recommend improvements."
After adopting the recommendations of the task force in 2006, the Regents agreed to reconvene a similarly constituted task force to review and report back on UC's progress in 2009. The new task force, like the original one, is co-chaired by Regent Joanne C. Kozberg and former California State Assembly Speaker Robert M. Hertzberg. Members include representatives from government, education, business and journalism.
The task force also heard from Katherine Lapp, UC executive vice president for business operations; Dwaine Duckett, vice president for human resources; and Dennis Larsen, executive director of executive compensation and performance management.
Lapp, Duckett and Larsen reported that of 16 policies targeted for revision, 10 delineating clear definitions of compensation approval authority, accountability, compliance and exceptions to policy and compliance have been completely revised and implemented. The other six policies are being revised and are scheduled to be presented to the Regents by the end of the current fiscal year.
In addition to actions by the Regents to ensure transparency for senior leadership total compensation, UC has publicly reported salary and gross pay for all university employees systemwide since November 2006.
"When it comes to public access to compensation information," Lapp said, "we believe the University of California is now among the most open universities in the nation, and we don't know of another university that has a Web site for compensation." The Web site was launched in 2006. (http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/compensation/)
Sheryl Vacca, UC senior vice president and chief compliance and audit officer, told the task force that independent audits since October 2007 have validated the completeness and accuracy of the annual reports on executive compensation. Her position and the Office of Systemwide Ethics Compliance and Audit Services were created to audit and validate management implementation of the task force recommendations to improve and assure controls are in place and mitigate risks. This relates to the task force's recommendations around the executive compensation area where management has implemented several actions to increase compliance through new or revised management controls established.
Since the initial task force was formed, the Regents have established a Committee on Compensation and created oversight standards for the review and approval of compensation, policies and other human resources-related activities.
The Regents also have delineated authority for compensation actions requiring approval by the Regents, the UC president or chancellors. They incorporated the standards into policy and process and established reporting and monitoring standards.
As a result, the Regents now exercise approval authority of compensation for approximately 350 staff members, including senior managers, direct reports to the president and direct reports to chancellors whose total compensation is greater than $275,000 when those compensation actions would be exceptions to policy.
In addition, any actions taken by the president, chancellors or lab director for staff with total annual compensation exceeding $214,000 are reported to the Regents at each meeting and posted on the UC Web site.
At the conclusion of the Aug. 13 meeting, the task force recommended that deans be removed from the senior management group because they are part of the faculty. If the Regents accept the recommendation, compensation action for the deans would continue to be reported to the Regents and posted on the UC Web site.
The task force agreed to aim for a final report to the Regents by the end of August 2009.