NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {Y} ou will have seen the ads for Tunnel to Towers, the charitable organization that provides mortgage-free homes for the families of cops, firemen, and active-duty military who have died or been damaged in service to their fellow Americans. The ads are small, gem-cut stories, movingly told. The celebrity endorsers — Mark Wahlberg, Cole Hauser, and Andy Pettitte — are smack-dab in the middle of the target demographic. And Frank Siller, the founder and CEO, makes for an authentic and powerful advocate for his righteous cause. Tunnel to Towers has become a lambent example of our civil society working just as Mr. Tocqueville had imagined it might: spontaneously bonded groups of citizens seeing a need, and then, after gathering private resources, delivering essential services to their fellow citizens, all of it government-involvement-free.

The Tunnel to Towers campaign is working. Like a charm. We know that not because of timely financial reports. Tunnel to Towers, in the manner of most charitable organizations — 501(c)3 organizations, in IRS terminology — files only a skimpy 990 tax form that is usually late and always minimally informative. We know that the Tunnel to Towers campaign is working because consumer-response ads disappear from national media the minute consumers stop responding to them. Over the past year, Frank Siller has become an omnipresence in right-leaning media. QED, Tunnel to Towers is working and, in large part, thanks to Frank Siller.

Now comes the hard part.

One day soon, or more likely on an evening after the staff has departed, Frank Siller will note that Tunnel to Towers has developed a positive cash flow, perhaps as much as a seven-figure difference between monthly income and scheduled outlays, perhaps even moving in spurts toward eight figures. He will note, as well, that, located as he is in the no-man’s land of the 501(c)3, nobody is watching him as he watches the cash pile up.

By “no-man’s land,” I mean to suggest that, while non-profit management is frequently analogized in the major media to for-profit management, it bears in reality almost no resemblance whatsoever. In a public corporation, the CEO is never left alone with the cash. His board of directors, by statute, has an audit committee that works with outside accountants to present detailed financial reports every three months. The attention of the committee members is concentrated by federal regulations requiring them to sign pledges attesting to the accuracy of the reports. A company of substantial size will also have an internal auditor who is highly incentivized to deliver accurate statements to the public: If he fails to do so, he will never work again. (The internal auditor is to the public company, roughly speaking, what the internal-affairs division is to the police department, where policemen are charged with policing the police.)

And then there’s the board as a whole. In the settled version of the trendy media, the corporate director is an overpaid, largely ceremonial figure whose principal role is to rubberstamp the CEO’s agenda and then catch the first plane out of town (which, not infrequently, would be his own). In practice, the director does indeed enjoy the fees, the perks, and the fractional power of his directorship. No question about that. But he always has a much stronger institutional loyalty elsewhere — that’s why he was chosen for the board seat in the first place: for his borrowed expertise, and his status — and he is acutely aware of the reputational risk he assumes at his full-time job by shirking oversight responsibilities at his part-time job.

Corporate CEOs are frequently accused, by peddlers of class resentment, of enriching themselves outrageously. That hasn’t been my experience. I have served as a director of seven public companies and advised the compensation committees of a dozen others and I have never seen a CEO enrich himself over even the intermediate term without at the same time enriching at least one and usually both of his most important constituencies — his employees and his shareholders. Are there rotten apples? Sure, every barrel has a few. But is the actualization of systemic greed the norm in the C-suites of publicly owned corporate America? No. That’s a tendentious Bernie Sanders trope.

The non-profit executive operates in a different world. Take his board of directors. In the start-up phase, when the boss can offer board members nothing but a little scut work and a lot of legal exposure, it’s pretty much a friends-and-family affair. Everybody is a volunteer. The start-up board is warmly supportive of the boss, of course, but it can be left in the dust by a rapidly growing non-profit. The rapid growth tends to breed problems that seasoned directors might have been able to anticipate, or resolve quickly.

When the CEO finally decides to upgrade the board, he usually adds donors who are pleased as punch to be associated with him and his wonderful charity. The new directors couldn’t be more delighted to be included and they couldn’t be less interested in raising potentially embarrassing questions.

In neither phase, then — start-up or early-stage success — does the non-profit CEO have the benefit of independent, experienced guidance. He is basically his own boss, and in ways that a corporate CEO can never dream to be: There are no strong guardrails erected by the board; regulators wave them through checkpoints reserved for the scrutiny of grubby profit-seekers; the media, frustrated by opacity, move on to easier reporting prospects; and the staff, regarding the CEO not as an incumbent executive but as the irreplaceable Leader for Life, is in full see-nothing, say-nothing mode.

It is with these powers, plenipotentiary in scope, that the non-profit CEO finds himself alone with the cash. And what often happens next? We probably don’t have to ponder that question at length: We can hazard a guess as to what can happen when human frailty meets illicit opportunity.

It’s a long sad story, the story of non-profit self-enrichment. Union pension plans raided. University endowments diverted to personal hobbyhorses. Non-profit compensation packages creatively inflated. Foundation missions bent and broken. Self-dealing driven by avarice. (And let’s be candid. It’s not just the bad guys. If you have a strong stomach, you might want to read the details of what happened at the National Rifle Association.)

All of which is why I’m asking you to join me in praying for Frank Siller. He has issued a crystalline call to conscience and he has built a fine young organization. We want him to succeed. We want him to show us how to do it the right way. And we want him to remember that he and his family are not tech entrepreneurs. They’re charity workers heavily subsidized by the taxpayers. They should pay themselves accordingly.