How TruthMark verifies public-employee accountability

The Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations (Principle 1: Do No Harm; Principle 6: Ethical Evidence Use) is load-bearing for this module. Public-employee data is open by law in most states, but rebroadcasting it raises the same risks the Safety and Lawyers modules face:

• Name collisions.“John Smith” the senior administrator is not the same person as “John Smith” the maintenance worker. An aggregator that flattens the two damages both.
• Disclosure rules vary by state. South Carolina excludes anyone earning under $50k. Virginia excludes anyone under $10k. Wyoming excludes salaries entirely. Texas retired its name-search system in May 2025. Aggregating those into one schema creates a record no state endorses.
• Records change. Promotions, transfers, and corrections happen constantly. The state portal has the freshest data; anything we cache is stale.

Building a separate aggregated index would create a fresh attack surface for misuse (bulk download, vigilante targeting, harassment of low-paid public workers) without adding accountability. We don't build that.

A few well-known databases — Transparent California (Reason Foundation), SeeThroughNY (Empire Center), Mackinac Center Michigan — often have bettercoverage than the official state portal. We don't link to them anyway. Those databases have substantial editorial value, but they are not the authoritative source of record. If a state-run portal is incomplete, that's a problem to solve at the state level — not by silently substituting an NGO database.

Where a state has no real public portal (more common than you'd think — Alaska, Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, Wyoming, and all 5 territories), we say so plainly in the directory note. We do not paper over the gap with an NGO link.

What the state portal you click through to actually publishes:

• Full name-level salary lookup. California (publicpay.ca.gov), Florida (salaries.myflorida.com), New York (Open Book), and ~25 other states publish a true name-search portal with most state employees.
• Top-earner threshold only. South Carolina ($50k+), Virginia ($10k+).
• Aggregates / contracts only, no name search. Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, several others. State employees by name require a public-records request to the state personnel office.
• No public portal at all. Wyoming explicitly excludes salaries from its checkbook. Territories (American Samoa, Guam, CNMI, Puerto Rico, USVI) don't publish a name-level lookup; verification runs through the territorial HR office.
• Texas — broader transparency, no name search. Texas retired its Employee Information System in May 2025. The Comptroller's broader transparency portal still publishes agency-level salary and contract reports, but individual lookups now require a Public Information Act request.

Most states intentionally do not publish individual child-welfare workers by name. State law typically classifies caseworkers as confidential employees under safety statutes — they face threats of violence, and disclosing their identities runs counter to the families and children they serve.

The Public Employees module does not feature a CPS / DCFS worker-by-name lookup because in most jurisdictions there is no such public lookup, and we wouldn't build one even if there were. Where states publish agency-level transparency (DCFS budgets, complaint outcomes, ombudsman reports), it flows through the state's broader transparency portal that we link to. For individual worker accountability, the path runs through the agency's internal review process and the state ombudsman — not a search bar.

State portals cover state and local government. For federal employees, contracts, and senior-official financial disclosures, the homepage links to five authoritative federal sources:

• USAspending.gov — Treasury's federal contracts, grants, and direct assistance database. Recipient + keyword search; deep-link includes the user's name when entered.
• OPM FedScope — aggregate federal civilian-workforce statistics. Position- level data only; no individual names.
• OGE financial disclosures — Form 278e for the President, Vice President, Senate-confirmed nominees, and senior executive-branch officials.
• U.S. House Financial Disclosures — annual disclosures and STOCK Act periodic transaction reports for Representatives and senior House staff.
• U.S. Senate Electronic Financial Disclosure — the parallel for Senators and senior Senate staff (gated by a one-time access agreement).

We don't pre-fetch from any of these. USAspending's URL accepts a keyword query string so we prefill that one when you enter a name; the others are search forms that require a paste.

• Performance, conduct, or grievance history. Most state portals publish compensation, not personnel files. Discipline outcomes generally require an agency-level public- records request.
• Contractor / vendor employees. State portals show direct employees. Contractors paid by the state appear on USAspending or state-checkbook expenditure tools, but the underlying employees of those vendors do not.
• Local-government coverage gaps. Most state portals cover state employees only. City, county, and special-district employees may or may not appear depending on each entity's reporting compliance.
• Confidential or excluded positions. Undercover law-enforcement, victim-protection staff, and certain child-welfare positions are routinely redacted or omitted by statute.