SEC staffers watched porn as economy crashed

WASHINGTON (AP) - 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 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.

The staffers’ behavior violated government-wide ethics rules, it says.

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

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SEC staffers watched porn as economy crashed

This has been going on for at least, AT LEAST, the last 5 years? FIVE YEARS? With most of those violations occurring in the last 2 1/2 years?

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (frequently abbreviated SEC) is an independent agency which holds primary responsibility for enforcing the federal securities laws and regulating the securities industry, the nation’s stock and options exchanges, and other electronic securities markets in the United States. The SEC was created by section 4 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (now codified as 15 U.S.C. § 78d and commonly referred to as the 1934 Act). In addition to the 1934 Act that created it, the SEC enforces the Securities Act of 1933, the Trust Indenture Act of 1939, the Investment Company Act of 1940, the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and other statutes. SOURCE

I’m not about to sit here and lie, and hypocrite myself by saying I have never looked at porn, I can’t lie about it, I have looked at porn, but, it never took place when the lives and fortunes of billions of people was at stake. It never happened at a time or place where the financial security and solvency of this nation was in danger.

Personally, I don’t care what anyone does to get their kicks, if it doesn’t hurt anyone else, OK. If they want to look at porn, ON THEIR OWN TIME, it’s their life, and I am not going to condemn them for it. But if MY money is on the line, if the money of this nation, and of every person and corporation in this nation is on the line, those IDIOTS need to have their head in the game, not on some porn page!

- A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.

- An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as “Sex” or “Pornography.” Yet he still managed to amass a collection of “very graphic” material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC’s internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.

- Seventeen of the employees were “at a senior level,” earning salaries of up to $222,418.

- The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008.

There is NO excuse for this behavior. These idiots have violated the public trust!

California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said it was “disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation’s economy on the brink of collapse.”

Try looking at it like this Mr. Issa, they had no business spending ANY time looking at porn if they were employed by the SEC. Their job description, in NO WAY, said anything about them having the ability to access and view unlimited pornography! 

He said in a statement that SEC officials “were preoccupied with other distractions” when they should have been overseeing the growing problems in the financial system.

Ya think?? 😕

Former SEC spokesman Michael Robinson said he shares the public’s outrage about SEC staffers who enjoyed porn on the taxpayer dime when they were supposed to be keeping the markets safe.

“That kind of behavior is just intolerable and atrocious,” said Robinson, now with Levick Strategic Communications. He said he expects SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro and her team are “very focused on” the issue.

If I were Michael Robinson I’d be pretty careful of my statements regarding anything to do with this investigation. Who’s to say it didn’t happen under his watch as well, and just hasn’t been brought to light yet?

Bottom line, these clowns will claim some type of sexual addiction, it will be judged not their fault, a ruling will come down saying that the SEC should have had better supervisory capabilities and controls, the SEC will pay for these creeps to go to therapy, quite likely on paid leave, and once they think everyone has forgotten about this, they will pass around a few URLs to the hottest and newest porn sites.

On OUR dime!