Annual fees for massage therapists will be going from $598 to $785, a 31% increase. In their announcement of the rising fees, the first part of CMTO’s justification is as follows.
“CMTO has not raised fees much beyond inflation in almost a decade (since 2009), while the size of our registrant base has increased by more than 40 percent.”
Most people’s eyes glaze over at the sight of numbers, but it pays to think a little. Let’s pull this statement apart. If “CMTO has not raised fees much beyond inflation in almost a decade (since 2009),” you can guess what happened in 2009. CMTO increased registration fees by 29%, which is more than a decade of inflation.
The next part is the most troubling: “while the size of our registrant base has increased by more than 40 percent.” If you don’t think much about this, it seems to make sense that you need more money to regulate more massage therapists. However, the fees are paid by an increasing number of therapists. So, even if CMTO never increased fees at all, they’d still be getting 40% more money. The 31% increase from $598 to $785 per year is on top of any increase in the number of registrants.
Here is a rewrite of the quote above removing the spin:
“Despite fee increases over the past decade that total more than double inflation, CMTO is now raising registration fees by 31% to $785 per year.”
The truth is that as the number of registrants increases, an efficient organization could have used economies of scale to control the fees paid by each registrant. But it’s not surprising that CMTO is looking for a big fee increase. C. Northcote Parkinson explained the nature of administration decades ago.
What's more frightening is that the person drafting this release probably doesn't understand it either.
ReplyDelete@Deborah: You may be right. But I suspect some of the people behind the crafting of this message knew exactly what they were doing.
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