In an industry not exactly brimming with blunt people — at least not publicly so — William Cooper, the chief executive of TCF Financial in Wayzata, Minn., stands out.
The outspoken banker agrees the public has a right to complain about, and the media to scrutinize, what's going on at companies accepting government assistance.
"There have been a lot of excesses, and bringing some accountability isn't the worst thing in the world," he said in an interview Monday. TCF, which accepted $361 million from the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program, is getting skewered over a recent employee trip to Snowmass Village, a ski resort near Aspen, Colo.
Mr. Cooper said that roughly 180 senior managers took the trip and that, though most covered the bulk of their own expenses, the company contributed $200,000 to cover the rest.
"We do take into consideration anything that would look bad, and we don't want to put the bank in a bad light, but this isn't one of them," Mr. Cooper said Monday. "It was a team-building event for people who have been under tremendous pressure, who didn't get bonuses.
"The psychic income that people get out of it is much bigger than the economic costs," he said.
Wells Fargo & Co. is also taking issue with criticism of expenses viewed as integral to doing business and boosting employee morale.
In a full-page ad Sunday in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and Monday in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, Wells Fargo, which got $25 billion under Tarp, conceded that companies that have received government funds should reexamine how much they spend on things like employee recognition events.
Though it has canceled a Las Vegas trip for dozens of its top mortgage officers — and all such events this year — Wells Fargo criticized news reports for treating every employee recognition event as a "junket, a boondoggle, a waste, or that it's for highly paid executives. Nonsense!"
On Monday, Wells spokeswoman Julia Tunis said the company ran the ad in part because, after being unable to recognize its employees in person, "we felt this was a way we could publicly acknowledge their accomplishments."
John Kanas, the former CEO of North Fork Bancorp who now oversees financial investments at the private-equity firm W.L. Ross & Co., said it is inappropriate for the public to "micro-manage" banks that have received government funds.
"But it's not going to stop the public's curiosity about these things, and it's not going to stop reporters writing about it," Mr. Kanas said. "Unfortunately for the banks, since they've had to take a great deal of taxpayer money, they are really in no position to dictate the rules that go along with it."
Though Mr. Cooper said he believes the government should stay away from dictating how much executives should be paid, he chose to forgo both his salary and bonus after TCF reported that full-year earnings fell 50%, to $129 million. "I don't think it think it's a good idea to have the government saying how people should be paid. If they want to put executive compensation to a vote of the shareholders, then that's fine with me. I believe government intervention usually results in unintended consequences that isn't healthy for the economy."
