The most expensive Cabinet!

Hi,

Disclaimer:
I am Apolitical. But I am totally against gutter journalism. Even though we are in an Information Age, people are usually lazy to cross check their facts and take sensationalised news as facts and consume them, which in turn breed some hatred in them.
I am by no means trying to call out anyone, but I am trying to cross check the facts given.
And I am interested in numbers.
My personal profile can be found here.

So i was browsing through facebook and chanced upon a certain ex-presidential hopeful's sharing. It is about "New Singapore Cabinet cost S$49 million a year excluding bonuses" by States Time Review. It also states that "Ministers with different portfolios will only be counted once, and the calculation is as follow:"
However, I do realised they still do double counting for some people like Desmond Lee, Sam Tan etc.

I understand that they are trying to simplify calculations using the below as a simple number calculation. These numbers are the pay our ministers get BEFORE bonus.
"Prime Minister – S$2.2 million
Minister – S$1.1 million
First time Minister – S$935,000
Parliamentary Secretary – S$572,000"

Being curious, I am interested to know the real number instead. 

So i dug out some interesting reports from 

http://www.psd.gov.sg/white-paper/white-paper

http://news.asiaone.com/News/Latest+News/Singapore/Story/A1Story20120104-319812.html

http://www.salarysingapore.com/minister-and-president-pay-cut-36-to-53-percent.html

According to these reports, 

I gather that Minister of States, and Minister have a difference in pay, and according to this awesome picture, we seemed to only have them as Full Ministers. 

Picture from Straits Time, taken from PM Lee's Facebook page.

Of course, since we do not know their grades, there will be some assumptions and guesses to be done. 

Minister Grading System

The grading are:

PM (Prime Minister)

DPM (Deputy Prime minister)

MR1

MR2

MR3

MR4

SMS (Senior minister of state)

MOS(Minister of state)

Mayor

SPS (senior Parliament Secretary )

Parliament Secretary

Pay Framework

Their pay structure is similar to our pay structure. 

13 months of fixed pay and the rest Variable.

Their worked example states that 

So, with this example stated, I can determine a MR4 Minister pay is $715k excluding bonus.

This table here provided by the white paper states that a MR4 is getting $1.1mil, which is the equivalent of 20 months pay for comparison.

So by doing some back counting, we will be able to tabulate that their pay without bonus is actually far lesser. 

So how much does our cabinet really cost?

$99 of course!

Okay lameee.

With the assumption of their grades, here is a simple calculation of their combined cost.

Strictly speaking, this is the cost of the cabinet, but according to that article, they included Minister of States and Parliament Sec into the picture. 

A grand total of both the numbers would be

$41,987,000 based on 20 months (1 Month AVC+ 3Month PB + 3 Month NB, realistic)

$27,291,550 based on 13 months (0 months for all)

$55,632,775 based on 26.5 months (1.5 month AVC + 6 month PB + 6 month NB, Maximum)

In conclusion...The article that states that 49 million for our cabinet without bonus is super sensational. The real number is a number closer to 28 million. But the number is indeed closer to a realistic payout to the cabinet INCLUDING bonus. But that doesn't change the fact that our cabinet are indeed paid well. Thank you for reading, and please do point out my wrong calculations, if any. All assumptions made are random, and i do not have a formula nor reason why i assume their grades as that. I just randomly group them into an average of 4 of each grade, with MR4 only 3 because the 2 SMS will eventually become MR4.