Sample Request
15 November 2012
Andrew Johnston
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
3000 Steinberg-Dietrich Hall
3620 Locust Walk
Philadelphia PA 19104
949-290-1948
[Address of Receiving Department]
Re: [Name of the state's public records act] Request
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am an academic economist seeking to study the relationship between employment taxes and wages, hiring, and layoffs. Kinks and changes in []’s UI experience rating schedule are an ideal setting to study this.
Under the [Name of the state's public records act], I’d like to request the electronic records of all employers enrolled in unemployment insurance since April 1, 1990.
For each reporting period (quarter), I am seeking the records (ideally a spreadsheet, database, or delimited text file) with the following fields for each employee of an employer participating in UI in [State]:
His or her employer’s ID,
His or her employee ID,
Employee’s wage in the quarter,
The job title of the employee,
The employer’s industry,
The UI employer rate,
The formula and underlying values determining UI employer rate (I think these underlying values are the amount of UI drawn from former employees over the past few years and the formula is an increasing function which has some maximum experience rate)
Whether and on what date the employee was laid off or discharged,
Whether and on what date the employee quit,
Whether and what date the employee was hired in that period, and
The type of ownership of the employer.
If the records include, hours worked, quantities produced, or revenues, the inclusion of these fields would be greatly appreciated.
I do not need to know the individual identities of firms or workers or any information that would allow me to infer an employee’s identity from publicly available data. Employers and employees can be de-identified for my purposes as long as there is an ID (perhaps randomly generated) so that I can follow companies and employees through time. I've done this for other states (North Carolina, Utah) in education and am able to identify individual students, teachers and principals over time including their salaries, discipline records, and test scores using the randomized IDs created for each teacher, student, and school.
If de-identifying the records is deemed unnecessary, I can enter a confidentiality agreement, store the data on a secure computer in a locked office and delete the data at the end of the project.
Title 35A Chapter 4 Section 312 of the Utah (Replace with appropriate local law) Code governs the privacy rules regarding employment information collected by government function. This code makes allowances for academic institutions to acquire personal data for evaluation of programs and performance measurement:
“The information obtained by the division under this section may be disclosed to…an employee or contractor of the department or an educational institution…engaged in workforce investment and development activities...for the purpose of...evaluating the effectiveness of those activities and measuring performance.”
If the records include other information regarding the firms including other employer classifications, revenues, quantities sold, hours worked, etc., its inclusion would be greatly appreciated.
If possible, I prefer the data in electronic format to paper records. Whatever format it currently exists is acceptable, although Excel, SAS, CSV, spreadsheet, .raw, or Stata are preferable.
I am willing to pay any reasonable and necessary fees associated with processing the request including paying for a programmer to de-identify workers and firms if that is determined necessary. If the fees associated with the request exceed $200 please call me.
I seek this information in the public interest as an economist at a non-profit research university, and not for a commercial purpose.
Thank you for your time. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Andrew Johnston
949-290-1948
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