OLYMPIA – The governor’s budget official is scrutinizing a list of top-paid Washington state employees after three physicians said their salaries were overstated.
“It’s got us scratching our heads,” said Wolfgang Opitz, deputy director of the Office of Financial Management. “We’re working on it.”
Dr. Michelle Terry, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington who treats patients at UW Physicians clinics and consults part-time for the Department of Social and Health Services, was No. 1 on the state’s list of best-paid general government employees released this week.
But Terry says her listed salary, $246,483, was grossly overstated, by more than $100,000. In e-mails to the agency and to reporters, she said she earns $60 an hour as a part-time consultant for DSHS, or about $21,000 a year. The UW paychecks total $10,200 a month, she said. The university said Thursday that her total UW compensation was $125,772 last year.
“So that is about $144k (from all state sources) for the year using current numbers,” she wrote.
Dr. Roy Simms, a medical consultant for DSHS, and Dr. Rebecca Tritt Wiester, who works with UW and DSHS, also said their totals were incorrect.
Opitz said the agency is investigating the problem to see what the accurate numbers should be. He said the problem may be with the coding and reporting from the UW, particularly in cases where there are multiple sources of the income, such as patient fees or federal grants administered by the college.
“One person can have multiple employers, all within the state of Washington, but they all get a green check,” he said.
The state generated the salary report and the list by having a computer merge information from the state government payroll and the computerized systems at the universities, he said.
Opitz said the department’s analyst is out of the country on a family emergency, but that the agency is trying to quickly unravel the problem, knowing that the doctors are upset and that the agency wants to put out only accurate information. He said no similar concerns have surfaced in the 44-year history of producing the salary list for public release.
Asked if the original list is definitely wrong, Opitz said, “I can’t definitively tell you that yet.” The department’s communications director, Anne Martens, wrote Terry that somewhere along the line “the payroll system annualized your numbers and misread the amount of time that you worked at the amounts listed.”
In an e-mail, Terry said OFM’s delay in correcting the information is “disturbing, distressing and offensive.” She said people are either congratulating or scolding her for the salary listing, and added in another e-mail, “I am really sad about it and I am not sleeping well.”
The list was one of two provided to reporters earlier this week. A higher education Top 100 is headed by the University of Washington president, Mark Emmert, and everyone on the list makes more than $200,000 a year.
On a separate Top 100 of other state employees, Gov. Chris Gregoire ranks 29th with a salary of $151,000 last year. The list also includes some college faculty and administrators, medical professionals who care for state clients or teach, money managers and a handful of government administrators.
The general government list is dominated by medical professionals who administer programs or provide direct services for the Department of Social and Health Services.
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