What Citibank can learn from the House bank - House of Representatives bank scandal

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1992 by Jonathan Rowe

And what the insulated media can learn from my bounced check

I don't write bad checks very often, but I did write one last year. It was an honest mistake, the kind many people make: A deposit didn't clear as quickly as I thought. Maybe I got a little sloppy because I believed I had something called "overdraft protection," my reward for maintaining a minimum balance with the bank.

It turned out, however, that this protection was nothing more than an advance of funds at credit card rates--in other words, a pricey loan. By the time I caught on a couple of months later, the meter was running at some 18 percent. But that's just the half of it. I already had the money on deposit in this very bank, in a savings account linked to my checking account. With just a few keystrokes, the bank could have transferred the funds and covered the check. Instead they lent me money I didn't need at loan-sharking rates.

Maybe that experience ought to make me indignant at the House payroll office, which allowed House members to avoid the fate that befell me. But the incident has had just the opposite effect. I can't get too upset with the payroll office because, for all the abuses there, Congress was actually on the right track for once.

Yes, the hundreds of overdrafts by House members such as New York's Robert Mrazek and Michigan's Robert Davis, who had 972 and 878, respectively, strike one as more than casual bookkeeping errors. The individuals exploiting the system for interest-free loans generally deserve the butt-kicking they may get. And there's no denying that the House payroll mess says something about Congress, and especially about its leadership. (Speaker Tom Foley has been indecisive, Minority Whip Newt Gingrich cravenly opportunistic.) Yet while Evans and Novak pounced lustily on the "pampered pols on Capitol Hill," it struck me that there's nothing inherently wrong with the concept of a financial institution that treats its customers as owners rather than as gougees. Abuses aside, the problem was not that the payroll system existed, but that Congress reserves such deals for itself, while failing to make the connection to the injustices the rest of us face. And too often, the media doesn't make the connection either.

In fact, the journalistic blood-feast over this scandal reveals at least as much about the news media as it does about Congress: its proclivity toward dinky stories that beat reporters can slap together on deadline, and the collective mid-life yearning for the glory days of Watergate.

Still, more important is what the payroll office story teaches about how the media defines the political debate. We were repeatedly told that the House payroll office was a "symbolic" issue, but rarely did the media give us a sense of the problems it was symbolic of, aside from a vague sense of governmental malaise.

Americans are pretty angry at the way they are treated by banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions. A recent poll by Money magazine found that more Americans are peeved about credit card interest rates than about federal income taxes--83 percent to 62 percent respectively. The public wasn't only outraged that Congress gave itself a break; worse was the way it shielded itself from the financial injustices its constituents suffer, thus blunting any sense of urgency to deal with these problems. That the media didn't press the government is a symptom of the sheltered life they lead themselves, compared to the rest of the country.

The fact is, public anger largely follows the direction the media carve out. The House payroll office provides a case study in how the media continually channel the nation's anti-establishment impulses against the government. Rarely are these impulses directed against those who stymie and corrupt that government with money and influence--those who often cause the abuses that people look to government to correct.

By now, readers of the daily press probably know more about the House payroll system than they do about their own banks. The system, created long before any current members were elected, pays House members through a payroll office that operates as a check-writing cooperative. Members' pay was deposited into accounts that together formed a kind of pool from which members could write checks. The payroll office didn't pay interest, the way a bank would. Instead, members could in effect take salary advances by writing checks against salary that hadn't been credited yet. These checks were covered by the pool; it has not been shown that taxpayer funds were used. In practice, the advances often were for just a few days. In this, members were doing pretty much what millions of Americans do with credit cards all the time: buy now and pay within 25 days, thereby avoiding interest. The system had no oversight, however, apart from the Sergeant at Arms, who was an avid checkbouncer himself (31 personal checks worth almost $105,000). With no written guidelines, the system was ripe for abuse. Some members, such as Mrazek and Davis, apparently were aware of the vacuum and exploited it to get free loans.