PermSec is the highest paid civil servant after the Minister.
I once temp at a stat board (no choice, PRs and Foreigners took away all jobs that were my first choices) for 6 months and was often mistaken by staff as an office boy(man) who did odd chores. I was doing an inventory list of office equipments in the Finance Dept one day and a lady staff, whose ranking is equivalent to that of financial controller in private sector, call to me 'hey you, there is some printouts, take them from printer and bring to me'. No 'please' or 'thanks'. So I took the printouts which were excel numbers and figures. I took a look and it was a spreadsheet on current/new year budgeting on monies allocation for highest level civil servants in that stat board. The two most obvious lines were the minister's pay + bonuses and that of the perm sec's. Let's say the perm sec's is very well taken care of.
Think of a figure between $500,000 and $1,000,000 and think of it being on the high side. I brought them to the lady staff and placed them on her table and left. Again, there was no mention of 'thanks' from her.
All perm secs are paid highly for their helicopter views, if you read their internal reports, a lot of strategic talks between inter and intra agencies and ministries, national planning for the next year, study visits to foreign countries (i.e. perm secs laid the roads and contacts for the ministers when they go overseas), etc.
I got to read internal reports because I was asked to do filing works too.... I have a degree but everyone in the office thought of me as a 'O' level dropout.
Anyway... the gist of it is that the top ppl are very very highly paid except that this fellow Tan shows to ST readers a glimpse of their high life ...
Today I still work as a short-term contract staff but no longer in that stat board.