By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
In a memo released last night by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the government agency in charge of overseeing the country’s financial institutions, officials report that senior staffers were spending hours viewing porn during office hours.
According to The Associated Press (AP), which obtained a copy of the memo, SEC Inspector General David Kotz revealed that he had conducted 33 probes of employees – 31 of which occurred since the country’s financial system nearly collapsed – and found a number of high ranking employees who spent hours looking at explicit sexual images on the Internet.
Among the findings:
– A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters who sometimes spent up to eight hours a day looking at porn, copied images to CDs or DVDs when his government computer ran out of hard drive space. He has resigned.
– SEC’s internal filter managed to block access to porn sites 16,000 times to one accountant on the staff who eventually managed to use Google to bypass the filter and create a large collection of “very graphic” material. He has been given a 2-week suspension.
Seventeen of the employees caught surfing for porn were “at a senior level” earning salaries of up to $222,418.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform told the AP 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.”
The SEC has declined to comment on the issue but former SEC spokesman Michael Robinson expressed outrage over the fact that staffers were viewing porn when they should have been overseeing the markets.
“That kind of behavior is just intolerable and atrocious,” he said, adding that the current head of the SEC, Mary Schapiro, is “very focused on” the issue.
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