I worked in a state govt office in Virginia some years ago and the local paper did a FOIA request for everyone's salaries in the state...and published an online

I worked in a state govt office in Virginia some years ago and the local paper did a FOIA request for everyone's salaries in the state...and published an online database of the upper 50%. http://data.richmond.com/salaries/ http://data.richmond.com/salaries/ My coworkers, by-and-large, were furious. I found it really helpful. I found out where I was relative to my peers (I was only behind by a few hundred bucks/year - we were all basically equal if we had the same title, except for one guy that had abused the state 10% raise when switching departments). One guy in our DBA/Ops team discovered he was getting a relatively paltry amount while his peers were all getting 6 digits (which was all on the bosses - his peers were also bothered by this). One or two people had very questionably high salaries and were suddenly held by others to be delivering at that level. Mostly, though, it calmed people down about salary differences. Honestly, it was awkward for some people, but honestly I think the benefits outweighed the costs, at least within the office. Much of my coworkers' outrage was about people OUTSIDE the office finding their salaries, such as friends, family, neighbors, people wanting money, etc.