UNM’s salary book is published each month by the Division of Human Resources, but a closer look at the book reveals inaccuracies.
Faculty Senate President Richard Wood said the Senate has not fully studied the book but has found incorrect salary listings in its pages.
“Our general belief is that it typically captures UNM employees’ base salaries accurately, but does not reflect any additional compensation,” he said. “It sounds like it’s much less reliable for student and part-time instructor salaries, possibly because they are so constantly rehired.”
The salary book has been the subject of controversy since Daily Lobo Editor-in-Chief Pat Lohmann requested an online version last semester. University officials repeatedly denied the Daily Lobo’s requests. The Albuquerque Journal picked up the story and published an online version of the book on its website, which sparked opinion editorials, letters and questions about the legality of student salaries being published in the book.
The Journal staff published an editorial about the discrepancy between base and actual salaries.
“What’s the difference between ‘compensation’ and ‘pay’? Thousands of dollars, in the case of some top University of New Mexico administrators,” the editorial said.
The salary book does not record car and housing allowances, performance bonuses and compensation, but according to the Journal editorial, UNM will pay more than $1 million in deferred compensation this year.
UNM President David Schmidly, for example, receives $594,600 in annual pay and compensation, but the salary book lists only his base pay of $387,600.
Human Resources Vice President Helen Gonzales did not respond to calls, visits and e-mails over the last week about salary book inaccuracies.
Daily Lobo staff members also noticed inaccuracies in their listed salaries to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. The salary book reported that Managing Editor Isaac Avilucea makes $52,000, for example, but he earns a little more than $10,000.
HR projects specialist Ray Sykes said the book costs $32 to produce once a month. He said HR gathers the list of salaries from UNM’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System, the online Banner system.
The Banner system is an online database structure that stores millions of records — including employee pay history — and can be viewed and updated via LoboWeb, according to a Banner instructional course put out by HR.
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Sykes said the UNM’s Information Technologies department started producing the salary book about 10 years ago, and HR took over production in January 2008.
