With­out a doubt, the Salaries Re­view Com­mis­sion (SRC) wields sig­nif­i­cant pow­er as the body that de­ter­mines the earn­ings of this coun­try’s top of­fi­cials.

How­ev­er, the 120th re­port, re­leased in No­vem­ber last year, re­vealed the SRC’s au­thor­i­ty to not on­ly give but al­so to take away, as was the case of the of­fices of the Di­rec­tor and Deputy Di­rec­tor of the Po­lice Com­plaints Au­thor­i­ty (PCA).

Un­like the vast ma­jor­i­ty of those list­ed in the re­port, for those two po­si­tions, cur­rent­ly held by David West and Michelle Solomon-Baksh, the SRC rec­om­mend­ed de­creas­es in pay.

In the case of the Di­rec­tor, the salary would drop from $38,540 to $33,700, be­fore ris­ing to $37,005, a net drop of $1,535, while in the case of the Deputy Di­rec­tor, the ini­tial drop is from $33,570 to $29,100, be­fore ris­ing to $31,954, a net drop of $1,616.

But while these salary re­duc­tions im­pact the of­fice of the PCA, the SRC re­port made it clear that the “in­cum­bents would con­tin­ue to en­joy cur­rent com­pen­sa­tion and be ‘red-cir­cled’ so as to en­sure that they are not dis­ad­van­taged by way of a re­duc­tion in com­pen­sa­tion.”

What this ef­fec­tive­ly means is that both West and Solomon-Baksh would con­tin­ue to earn their cur­rent salaries. How­ev­er, those who would re­place them in the fu­ture stand to earn less.

The le­gal chal­lenge be­ing brought by West and Solomon-Baksh, there­fore, is to de­ter­mine why the SRC has de­pre­ci­at­ed the val­ues of these of­fices with­out con­sul­ta­tion with the in­cum­bents.

The SRC had part­ly ex­plained its de­ter­min­ing process, done in two parts: First­ly, a job eval­u­a­tion score, and sec­ond­ly, a com­pen­sa­tion sur­vey us­ing mar­ket da­ta.

To de­ter­mine salaries, the SRC used the of­fices of Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary, MP and Puisne Judge as pub­lic sec­tor an­chors. Those of­fices served as the ref­er­ence rates from which all oth­er job com­pen­sa­tions were de­ter­mined.

The SRC then looked at how pri­vate sec­tor jobs were rat­ed against pri­vate sec­tor an­chors and sought to make com­par­a­tive ap­pli­ca­tions with­in the pub­lic sec­tor.

There­fore, the SRC would have de­ter­mined that when com­pared to the pri­vate sec­tor, the dis­tance be­tween the of­fice of PCA Di­rec­tor and its re­spec­tive pub­lic sec­tor an­chor was wide enough to war­rant a less­er salary.

What re­mains un­clear, though, is what pub­lic sec­tor an­chor the SRC used to de­ter­mine how far away the PCA Di­rec­tor’s of­fice is on the salary scale.

Fur­ther­more, the SRC’s re­port did not re­veal what com­par­a­tive pri­vate sec­tor an­chor and salary scale were used in de­ter­min­ing the PCA’s salaries.

If, for ex­am­ple, the com­par­a­tive pri­vate sec­tor an­chor was a bank CEO, this would sug­gest that the salary of the PCA Di­rec­tor should be more in keep­ing with a se­nior risk of­fi­cer in­stead of a se­nior vice pres­i­dent.

Since the gap be­tween the lat­ter post is fur­ther away from the CEO than that of the for­mer post, then it stands to rea­son that the salary gap would al­so be fur­ther away.

To ap­ply such a for­mu­la to the pub­lic sec­tor with­out telling us what the an­chor is and why the PCA’s of­fice re­quired a fur­ther dis­tance has cre­at­ed a trans­paren­cy is­sue.

West and Solomon-Baksh’s ar­gu­ment is that the SRC’s val­u­a­tions were un­fair and that they did not give the of­fice­hold­ers the op­por­tu­ni­ty to be heard, as was done pri­or to the 98th SRC re­port, which was pub­lished in 2013.

Giv­en the im­por­tant work done by this of­fice, it is even more crit­i­cal that the SRC use this op­por­tu­ni­ty to bet­ter ex­plain how its com­pen­sa­tion sur­vey was ap­plied in this par­tic­u­lar re­view.