PriceWaterhouse needs to come clean on this one

On February 17, 2014, an article in the local media suggested that, the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) was proposing "major changes in remuneration of state and public officials", after a job evaluation exercise conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for all State Officers. This was long before a job evaluation exercise for the Public officers had been concluded. In the article, titled: “President to top pay list under new rules”, the author proceeded to suggest that PwC had conducted the job evaluation exercise "for all State Officers" using "the USA and South Africa for comparative bench-marking."     

I was skeptical about the facts in the article, and on February 20, 2014, I made the following comments:

It is not clear whether the writer is referring to a different remuneration structure from the one that appeared in Kenya Gazette Vol. CXV - No 33 of March 1, 2013, showing the new structure for the State Officers. What is surprising though, is the idea that PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) conducted a job evaluation for all the State Offices using “the USA and South Africa for comparative bench-marking”.  I doubt that PwC would do that; since doing so would be tantamount to taking the Salaries and Remuneration Commission, and Kenyans at large, for a ride!

Clearly, international pay comparisons would be useful only for indexing purposes. In this case, the idea would be to compare countries with close, or similar economies, or characteristics, depending on the parameters being compared.

The article also indicated that the job evaluation had resulted in "creating 112 State Offices up from 50". The author did not clarify whether the additional State Offices were new jobs, or new positions – (a job can have several positions). My concern was that the author of the article was wrong on facts.

It is important that PwC clarifies whether the firm did in fact conduct a job evaluation exercise, and the method(s) used, for the reasons I have given here:

·       An indexing exercise cannot be construed to be job evaluation.

·       The contents of Kenya Gazette Vol. CXV – No 33 of March 1, 2013, did not reflect results of a job evaluation.

·       State Officers' jobs were spread across three arms of the government, and also across the counties and the National Assembly. The counties and the National Assembly were yet to be established when the exercise was purported to have been conducted.

·       Even if we were to assume that PwC did conduct a job evaluation exercise, then, a single exercise could not have been applicable across different entities as the published results appeared to indicate.

The fact that PwC has to-date not refuted the author's claims, the onus is on the firm to come out clean on this.   

As early as January 11, 2013, I was questioning the validity of the job evaluation being conducted across different entities when I made the following observation:  

The ongoing job evaluation exercise for the State Officers’ jobs may be difficult to justify, since a State Officer’s job can be evaluated only within the entity it belongs in. It should be obvious to any competent job analyst that psychometric measurements, such as job evaluations, can be conducted only within the parameters of the system being subjected to such measurements, and not across two or more other systems. The premise on which the current exercise is based cannot be justified. 

The question remains: If PwC did conduct a job evaluation exercise in 2012/'13, for the State Officers, what method(s) did the firm use?