> In California, the salary of its state employees are publicly available here:
http://transparentcalifornia.com/That's not just state employees (its public employees from different public entities within the state), and its also fairly poorly aggregated from disparate sources, such that if you add all the pay and benefit columns together, they often don't match the pay + benefits (and some people who I personally know have non-zero regular pay show with zero in all pay columns, an actual number in the benefit column, and a pay + benefit that is both higher than the benefit amount (remember, all the pay columns are zero) and lower than the person's actual pay before benefits.
There's another similar source [0], which has slightly different coverage (but both cover state employees), which has substantially different numbers for the same years for people covered by both.
Presumably, for state employees, both of those third-party aggregators have done public records requests for the same public information from the State, but they've both processed it using different (and opaque) methodologies, so that no one actually using it knows what they actually mean (the latter source, by using only one number for each person, doesn't make it as clear that they are doing something funky with the data; the former tries to do more, which makes it even more clear that they are doing something weird, because it makes inconsistencies visible.)
They do a good job of creating the illusion of readily-accessible accurate data if you are only aware of one of them and don't have any independent knowledge to verify them against.
[0] http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/arti...