Inflated salary figures prompt process review

The State Services Commission will be "clarifying the process" with the University of Canterbury after a "regrettable error" led to vastly inflated salary figures appearing in its annual report.

The university says it was only doing as it was told.

The commission's annual report showed two vice-chancellors were paid a combined total of between $710,000 and $730,000 last year.

Former vice-chancellor Roy Sharp collected between $440,000 and $450,000 in the seven months to his July departure, and acting vice-chancellor Ian Town collected $270,000 to $280,000 from July 26 to the end of last year, the report said.

The figures were reported in yesterday's Press. It emerged yesterday that they were annual figures and therefore incorrect as neither of the two men had worked a full year.

A university spokesman said Sharp had been paid $249,735 and Town $121,101.

"That's their information," a commission spokesman said. "They gave us the figures and we published them in the annual report. We acknowledge now after talking to them that they're incorrect.

"As you can imagine, we collect a lot of data for this report and we're not in a position to massage the data. We just say, `Tell us what you paid the people'."

The university had sent the annual salary figures and "they expected us to make some sort of calculation", he said.

"We're not in the business of making changes to other people's data; we just publish it."

The spokesman said it was a "regrettable error" and the commission would be "clarifying the process" next year.

A university spokesman said the commission had asked for the full salary figures. The commission's report did not note that the payments were made on a pro-rata basis, and the error had occurred in the interpretation of the data.

- © Fairfax NZ News