The Maine State Employees Association criticized the Maine Heritage Policy Center for circulating false information on its new Web site, www.maineopengov.org.

The Web site creates a searchable database of expenditures with state money and public employee salary.

The MSEA prefaces their statement by saying they support openness and transparency in government.

A release stated today:

“Yet the Maine Heritage Policy Center has done a serious disservice to Maine’s public workers and all Maine residents by attempting to identify public workers by name and their purported earnings. An informal check of the database reveals serious errors, including the doubling of one public high school teacher’s stated earnings in 2007 to wrongly claim she earned over $100,000 when in fact her annual salary was half that amount. Such inaccuracies published under the guise of ‘public information’ only serve to carry out the anti-worker agenda of the Maine Heritage Policy Center.”

MHPC executive director Tarren Bragdon told PolitickerME that the information is what was provided to the center by the state. If the state gave them wrong information, then it is wrong on the site, he said.

The site has a disclaimer saying exactly that – “THE MAINE HERITAGE POLICY CENTER AND/OR ITS SUPPLIERS MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT THE SUITABILITY, RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, TIMELINESS, AND ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION, SOFTWARE, PRODUCTS, SERVICES AND RELATED GRAPHICS CONTAINED ON THE MAINEOPENGOV WEB SITE FOR ANY PURPOSE.”

Bragdon said that there is a means on the site where people can contact them to alert them to inaccuracies. In that case, however, the MHPC is put in the position of having the complainants word against the state’s, so Bragdon said the best remedy is for those who spot inaccuracies to contact the state directly.