Information related to PHARMAC employee remuneration/salary bands

15 October 2020

Dear [name and contact details redacted]

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION

Thank you for your request dated 30 September 2020 under the Official Information Act 1982 (OIA) for information relating to remuneration of PHARMAC employees. You requested:

• a breakdown of the information relating to salary bands for PHARMAC employees, board members and the senior leadership team.
  
  Please include the following information:
  • A breakdown of the salary bands of employees, board members and contractors in PHARMAC in the current financial year
  • In each band (e.g. $80,000 to $90,000; $91,000-$100,000), please outline the number of employees in each band, the job titles and broken down by men and women
  • Please do the same for board members and the senior leadership team including all payments/salaries/inducements they receive in a separate breakdown
  • Please also outline the total amount spent on employee salaries AND contractors each year for the past three years

Please note that PHARMAC approaches its assessment of requests for information under the OIA on the basis that, once released, the information becomes publicly available - in other words once we release the information to you it becomes available to any other party in that exact form (whether by you distributing it to others or by virtue of us receiving the same request from a different third party). 

PHARMAC’s current remuneration bands, including the number of employees in each band, are detailed on the following page of this response. We have withheld job title and gender information from the remuneration bands provided as we consider this is necessary to protect the privacy of natural persons (section 9(2)(a)).

The total remuneration paid to board members and the senior leadership team, in addition to PHARMAC’s annual personnel costs and staff gender and ethnicity breakdowns are detailed in our annual reports which are available on our public website [URL updated]. PHARMAC’s Annual Report for the year ended 30 June 2020 will be released in November 2020 and as such, we have not provided the past financial year’s remuneration figures in this response as this information will soon be publicly available (section 18(d)).

As required under the OIA, we also considered whether, in the circumstances, the withholding of this information was outweighed by other considerations which render it desirable, in the public interest, to make this information available. In this case we did not consider that the public interest outweighed the reasons for withholding the information.

PHARMAC remuneration bands

Effective 1 July 2020

NZD ($)

Please note you have the right, by way of complaint under section 28(3) of the OIA to an Ombudsman, to seek an investigation and review of our decision.

We trust that this information answers your queries. We are making our information more freely available, so we will now publish selected OIA responses (excluding personal details) on our website.  Please get in touch with us if you have any questions about this.

Yours sincerely

Rachel Read
Manager, Policy and Government Services