Representatives from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Business Services presented updates on the recently launched OpenBook Wisconsin policy at an Academic Staff Committee meeting Monday.
The OpenBook Wisconsin policy was an initiative stemming from Gov. Scott Walker’s administration, which aims to provide more transparency with the financial actions of the state government. The information includes spending from within the UW System.
The state law went into effect Jan. 2, when the OpenBook Wisconsin website was launched. The website allows public access to state expenditures through looking up any individual and seeing what costs they have reported.
Martha Kerner, assistant vice chancellor of the UW-Madison Division of Business Services, explained that the development of the site will be broken up in to three phases, with expenditures being the first. The second phase will focus on outlining salaries and fringe benefits, while the third will target grants.
Though the policy’s goal is to provide clarity of where exactly state dollars are being spent, Kerner said this system is not an accurate representation of the financial actions.
“Anyone who has a financial background, or anybody who is really monitoring expenses, realizes that this is not intended to be any sort of accurate financial system whatsoever,” Kerner said. “It is widely known that there are some peculiarities and oddities [to the figures], and people should not rely on them.”
Kerner said there is currently no timeline in place for enacting the next two phases of the policy, but noted there had been many delays in establishing the first phase.
Director of Academic Personnel Office Steve Lund also presented information to the committee on the new procedures in plan for completing background checks for personnel.
Under the new system, employees would be required to report an arrest within 24 hours of being taken into custody, and additional rechecks will take place for employees with incidents on record.
Committee members expressed concern that unfair assumptions would be made about employees through disclosing crime occurrences, though Lund said the important thing is for the university to know about the circumstances.
“It is our obligation as an employer to take those [incidents] seriously,” Lund said.
