SEC’s Dirty Little Secret

Posted on Apr 23, 2010

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One wonders if there is a smutty equivalent to Nero’s fiddling while Rome burns. If there is, it might be applicable to senior staffers at the SEC who spent hours watching pornography on government computers instead of policing the nation’s financial system. —JCL

The Associated Press:

Senior staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were being paid to police the financial system, an agency watchdog says.

The SEC’s inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained late Thursday by The Associated Press.

The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.

It was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

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