The Academic Senate applauded Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef's State of the Campus address this week, and then a professor asked the only question:

Why did the university give W-2 tax data to a third party without employees' express permission?

The chancellor said he was as surprised as anyone by the new W-2 reporting mechanism, under which tax data goes to TALX Corp., which in turn plugs the data into your tax forms automatically when you use tax preparation software like TurboTax or TaxCut.

The only way to keep TALX from getting your information was to opt out of the system, by following the procedures laid out in a university memo that first went out in mid-December.

The university picked the wrong time of year to send out such an important memo, some faculty members said, and should have used an opt-in system.

Senate members voted unanimously in favor of a resolution demanding that UC act immediately to direct TALX to expunge all the W-2 data that it collected for UC Davis employees. And, if the university decides to start all over again, it should consult first with the appropriate senate committees, and set up an opt-in system for participation.

Mike Allred, associate vice chancellor for finance, said by e-mail the day after the senate meeting that expunging all the data "may be hard to do and seems to ignore the wishes of the thousands of employees who do wish to take advantage of the service provided by TALX."

Instead, the UC Office of the President has made a change to the At Your Service Web site (https://atyourserviceonline.ucop.edu), reopening the mechanism that allows employees to prohibit their tax data from going to TALX. For employees whose data already went to TALX, choosing to opt out now will purge their data from TALX within a few days, Allred said.

Employees can opt out this way through March 30, Allred said, even though the Web site text indicates Jan. 1 as the deadline. The president's office did not alter the text, Allred said, so as not to mislead employees at other campuses into thinking that they too could make changes through March 30. In fact, Allred said, the extension is for UC Davis only. He noted that the university extended the opt-out deadline once before, from Jan. 1 to Jan. 10, in response to concern that people had not seen the notice in the rush of the holidays.

Some faculty members also charged that the opt-out system violated the university's Electronic Communications Policy, which states that "in no case shall electronic communications that contain personally identifiable information about individuals … be sold or distributed to third parties without the explicit permission of the individual."

The UC general counsel's office, however, declared in an analysis that the forgoing section applies to data gathered in the course of communication "transactions," and that it "does not appear to apply generally to all records maintained by the university that contain personal information."

Further, the general counsel's office declared, the university acted properly under the Information Practices Act and its provision that allows disclosure internally to university employees and agents with an official need to know the information.

"In this case, TALX is acting as the university's agent for purposes of providing this tax service to the university's employees."

— Dave Jones