SEC Officials Busy Wanking While Economy Collapsed

Wonder how Bernie Madoff, AIG, and Goldman Sachs were able to pull billion dollar scams right under the noses of regulators? The SEC was obviously pre-occupied.

The investigation, which was conducted by the SEC's internal watchdog at the request of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, found 31 serious offenders over the past two and a half years. Seventeen of the offenders were senior SEC officers with salaries ranging from $100,000 to $222,000 per year.

Eight Hours a Day Spent on Porn Sites

One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices.

An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.

Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.

In one case, the report said, an employee tried hundreds of times to access pornographic sites and was denied access. When he used a flash drive, he successfully bypassed the filter to visit a "significant number" of porn sites.

The employee also said he deliberately disabled a filter in Google to access inappropriate sites. After management informed him that he would lose his job, the employee resigned.

A similar SEC report for October 2008 to March 2009 said that a regional supervisor in Los Angeles accessed and attempted to access pornographic and sexually explicit Web sites up to twice a day from his SEC computer during work hours.

The SEC is supposed to be there to protect us from financial trickery, but failed. Now congress is telling us that all we needed was more regulation. Brilliant.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit said it best:

WHEN THE PRIVATE SECTOR FAILS, THE SOLUTION IS MORE GOVERNMENT. WHEN THE GOVERNMENT FAILS, THE SOLUTION IS MORE GOVERNMENT.

[via Instapundit]