No. The Freedom of Information Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_information_act) allows anyone to request the salaries of government officials. Usually this means that newspapers request the salaries for all government officials and put it in a public database. My local newspaper does the same thing (http://datacenter.courier-journal.com/government/salaries/in...), and I presume yours does too, providing you live in the United States. Try searching for "$YOUR_NEWSPAPER_NAME salary database" in your favorite search engine.

FOIA is only for federal information. Most states have some sort of equivalent, but the restrictions on what information is released varies.

I think it's quite simple. If I'm a taxpayer in California, I want to know how my tax dollars are being spent.

Specifically, I'd like to know why a football coach is pulling in $2M a year while state employees are being threatened with furloughs and we're running the biggest deficit ever.

The theory is that the football coach, via increased advertising dollars from a successful football program, is bringing a lot of value. Say what you will, but big college football programs pay for themselves, and then all the other sports at the college too. At least, this is what my brother, a college sports nut, tells me.

That is correct. The football and/or basketball programs at many schools support the entire athletic department. The schools can then offer many other sports that don't even cover their costs.

That is until they blow 5 years of profits by overbuilding a new sports center for just the football and baseball teams, to replace the 3 year old center that was also overbudget. In that case, they have to cut the italian program. Go OSU :\

It's just not advertising dollars .. they are not that much of a deal maker as far as college sports.

The success of the program and the upward trend has a major effect on these things, among others:

1) # of season tickets + individual game tickets sold 2) Seat Licenses 3) Donations to keep the tickets (e.g. My School has priority points. You need a certain # of points each year to keep the seats in the same section or get into a better section and better parking). 4) More Donations and endowed scholarships from Boosters towards infrastructure improvements or money towards the fund (viz. Nike's donation to U. Oregon, T Boone Pickens and Oklahoma State, etc.) 5) Not as significant but a successful program also leads to increase in number of applicants (esp. if the program is trending up and the exposure is increasing)

Also, The head coach might be making more than what the state paycheck comes across as .. the additional amount is either paid through an athletic funds trust or a certain percentage of advertising revenue or a certain percentage is footed by wealthy alumni

Well, it's important the USA stay competitive in the global ball relocation industry.

I know, that's harsh, lots of people love sports and donate to their colleges on that basis, sports are good for character development and leadership skills as well as physical development and so on. But I have a really hard time seeing this kind of thing as anything other than an indirect subsidy to the sports industry.

I don't doubt that could be true, and if it's true then it certainly makes sense to spend $ to generate $$.

Hopefully not a parallel to overpaid CEOs whose primary responsibility is to generate wealth for the stock holders rather than take care of the employees.

You have it backwards. A CEOs responsibility is to generate shareholder value. If they work to line senior managements' pockets, that's the pathology.

If you own a share of a company, does that entitle you to know the salaries of all its employees?

Usually the yearly report for the company will show the salaries of all the top executives and board members. Not sure what the actual "law" is on that though.

It "feels" wrong, but that's the way it's set up.

I used to work for UCOP (it's in the list), and about 5 years ago there was a big issue around "total compensation" for the high-level employees. That was the event that really sparked the level of transparency that you see in this database. Around that time, I recall my manager basically telling us that our salaries were all printed out in some book in Sacramento, and that people could look them up if they really wanted to. I guess the online database just makes it seem a bit too easy.

If you care more about the UCOP stuff google for "UCOP Compensation SFGate" you'll get plenty of info. Here are a couple links to get you started on what was going down:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/13/...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/13/...