Countries should focus on improving financial systems, writes JAMES DORANin New York

ONE QUESTION unites every worker from the executive to the lowliest burger flipper at McDonalds, but it is a question that rarely solicits an answer – “How much do you get paid?”

We all want to know who earns more than us; we want to know why we don’t get paid more; and we want to know why do those who seem to do so little around the office get paid so much.

There is a very good reason, though, why the content of one’s pay packet is sacrosanct. If the disparity between colleagues’ pay in most places of work were to become known, all hell would undoubtedly break loose.

Now, imagine upping the ante by a factor of several millions. Imagine if you found out that the bloke down the corridor from you earned tens of millions compared to your tens of thousands. At worst there would be a riot. At best you would be so depressed that you probably couldn’t face going to work ever again.

Thanks to Andrew Cuomo, the eternally inquisitive attorney general of New York, thousands of Wall Street bankers have just discovered how much a handful of their colleagues take home.

Given the circumstances of most people in the Wall Street workforce, the reaction was robust to say the least.

On Wednesday Mr Cuomo subpoenaed seven former Merrill Lynch executives as part of an ongoing investigation into the timing of year-end payments at the investment bank. At issue are nearly $4 billion of such payments that, it has been suggested, were rushed through at the last minute by former chief executive John Thain while he was in the final stages of sealing a merger with Bank of America.

Bank of America shareholders were infuriated when they learned of the payments, as were the bank of America workers who didn’t get any such fat cheque.

Andrea Orcel, David Sobotka, Peter Kraus, Thomas Montag, David Gu, David Goodman and Fares Noujaim were named and shamed by the attorney general as executives who received particularly juicy payouts at the year-end and as such, are now the faces of Wall Street greed, plastered on websites and placards by aggrieved union members and laid off bankers.

An even greater issue in this case, however, is who actually paid the bonuses: Merrill Lynch, Bank of America or the US taxpayer?

The bonus payments were first revealed in public just days after Bank of America received $20 billion in aid from the US government that the banking giant said it needed to help offset losses it was absorbing from Merrill.

The government reluctantly agreed to the massive cash injection as Ken Lewis, the Bank of America chief executive, seemed like he was getting cold feet and could let the deal slide.

The government, meanwhile, did not want to see Merrill hung out to dry as the deal was orchestrated over the same weekend in September Lehman Brothers collapsed, an event that sparked the most intense episode of the financial crisis.

So Cuomo, and other attorney generals in North Carolina – Bank of America’s home state – and elsewhere in the US are taking a good look at the details of the payouts to determine if anything untoward went on and if so, can they get the money back.

The lawsuits, the subpoenas, the investigations and the moral prevaricating are all just a smoke screen. Wall Street bankers are in a way the easy targets in the bigger picture of financial malfeasance that has led our economies and our banks to their current precarious position.

In times like these we need to identify the villains who profited while we were losing our shirts, but lawyers and politicians in the US and in Ireland would be better off weeding out real fraud, and focusing on improving our financial system than creating scapegoats.