Where do I sign up?

TWENTY YEARS AGO, I WORKED for an organization that had payroll deduction for coffee, forbade conversation in the hallways and required all 20 employees to work 8.25 hours per day. (I got a check from the inevitable wage-and-hour settlement.)

Private corporations throwing big money around sometimes becomes news, and it's only outrageous when practiced by companies that have come crawling to taxpayers for handouts. But here's the deal: I really don't think many private companies allow the hired help to be so prodigal, at least not for long, because that money is being diverted from the owner's pocket. Wal-Mart reported its vice chairman, Tom Coughlin, to the feds for padding his generous salary with gift cards--and disciplined employees who theoretically should have caught him sooner.The latest hand-in-cookie-jar scandals put me in mind of the bad old days at the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System under Bill Shirron. Watchdog reporting ended Shirron's career, and the newly energized trustees took prompt action when a subsequent director, Paul Doane, found creative ways to supplement his own compensation package.The personality of a workplace, its corporate culture, comes from the top. That's been part of my fascination with recent revelations about free-spending habits at the Little Rock National Airport, the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery and the Pulaski County Special School District. Until those meddling reporters and state auditors started sniffing around, those must have been fantastic places to work--at least for the boss and those in his good graces. (Is it my imagination, or do these kinds of playgrounds always seem to be run by men?)The boss, like Captain Queeg on his obsessive search for the missing strawberries, once spent an entire afternoon trying to determine why I hadn't been informed of the proper procedure for getting access to a closet when the usual keeper of the key was on vacation. On another unforgettable day, he reprimanded me for daring to sketch out an organizational chart for a new employee.Routine lunches on the agency credit card, expensive birthday celebrations, clothing, first-class travel with family members in tow, housing allowances, generous comp time for exceedingly well-paid managers, and so infinitely on. I've had six employers over the past 28 years, and I've never seen anything like this kind of corporate culture. But, of course, that's because I've spent my entire career in the private sector.The munificence of these public agencies has become public knowledge entirely because they are public agencies. (Imagine a world without the Freedom of Information Act, or in which each agency can decide for itself just how free it wants its information to be.) And these outrages are outrageous because these are public employees spending public money.Meanwhile, over at the Little Rock National Airport, the commissioners are suddenly in austerity mode, even forgoing industry conventions that presumably have been valuable in the past. Most astonishing, however, is the proposal that the commission start reviewing all of Executive Director Ron Mathieu's expenses. These commissioners are mostly seasoned business executives, so I'm amazed they don't know this fundamental rule of management, best expressed by "Good to Great" author Jim Collins: "The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you've made a hiring mistake."Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. E-mail her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.As I walked out of that asylum for the last time, which still ranks among the happiest moments of my life, he stopped me in the parking lot and suggested that I return the baby shower gifts that co-workers had given me a year earlier. When I learned of his death years later, the world seemed to me an ever-so-slightly better place.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. E-mail her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.