It’s exasperating enough for citizens when elected officials accept expensive gifts from the interests those officials are supposed to govern. Meals, drinks, junkets, rounds of golf, sports tickets and the like are lavished on lawmakers — for purely “educational” purposes, of course — and both givers and receivers routinely insist that nothing is being bought or sold but “access.”
But at least elected officials answer periodically to the voters. If constituents sometimes seem indifferent to disclosures of government to the highest bidder, such is the nature of representative government.
A trend reported last week in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is potentially more troublesome.
According to disclosure reports examined by the AJC, more than 600 non-elected state employees accepted gifts from government vendors over the last two years, in spite of a 2003 executive order from Gov. Sonny Perdue banning gratuities valued at more than $25.
None of the hundreds of apparent violators has been disciplined, the newspaper reported.
The explanations and rationalizations are what we’ve all come to expect. One lobbyist assured the AJC that state business in return for these gifts and conferences and trade shows is “never the expectation.”
Right. That explains why businesses seeking government contracts spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on people who work for government.
In this case, the issue is not just integrity but also accountability. At virtually every level — but certainly at the statehouse level and higher, where millions of dollars are spent every day — it is as often a bureaucrat as an elected official who makes day-to-day decisions about purchases. Washington has given us the slang term “staffocracy” — government by people whose names and faces most of us don’t know.
The AJC report alluded to a high-profile case of the kind of abuse that can result from staffocratic corruption: In 1999, it was discovered that Dotty Roach, head of the state purchasing agency under Gov. Roy Barnes, had accepted more than $1,000 worth of gifts from software companies. She later received a $450,000 commission when Oracle and PeopleSoft got state contracts totaling some $40 million, and Barnes fired her.
A more recent if substantially less egregious example reported by the newspaper was that of Chip Mitchell, a project manager for the state Department of Economic Development, who got almost $1,700 worth of golf, meals and other perks from Georgia Power. He told the Journal-Constitution that department policy would not allow him to comment.
How convenient, and how curiously selective. Since when is the rule against commenting on lobbyists’ gifts more binding than the one against accepting them?
Public employees who don’t answer to the public need to be held answerable to somebody. Right now in Georgia, that “somebody” is a phantom presence.
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