Selective Access to HR Policies

We are implementing our HR solution for a fairly large organization (2000+ employees). We had just gone live on the Leave module and a lot of employees were applying online for Leave. A number of employees were getting a message of "Leave Not eligible" even though they had a balance in their account. The organization had a fairly complicated Leave Policy and most of the employees were not aware of the full policy.

I was speaking to the HR Head of the organization and informed him of this problem. I also told him that this could be addressed by publishing the Leave and other Policies online. His response was "Other companies will then become aware of our Policies and the benefits that we provide and will copy them. So we would like the info to be confidential".

Does it really matter that you are giving a Car to a person at a VP Level and the knowledge of this is a competitive advantage? Or that you are giving a Study Leave to employees of "X" category and no other organization would know about this or implement this?

Even withing an organization, does it cause intense distress to an employee to know that his Boss is entitled to a Toyota Car and he is entitled to a Maruti 800? Will it be judged the same way if the benefit is money and not a non-monetary benefit? Can it still be made public? The question is open!

There is another interesting article on this at the Evil HR Lady blog.