SEC Bureaucrats Run Roughshod Over Taxpayer and Federal Laws

ATR ^ | 2011-07-08 | Jon Mahaffey

[92nina]

The Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Schapiro and her bureaucrat underlings came under fire once again in a hearing on Wednesday for the agency’s decision to lease 900,000 square feet of unneeded office space at Constitution Center in downtown Washington, D.C. The bureaucrats that pulled the trigger obligated the taxpayers to pay $556 million in lease obligations over the course of the next 10 years. Rest assured these bureaucrats are going to have some major legal problems if the Department of Justice (DOJ) pursues a criminal investigation on the $556 million lease debacle. The DOJ is most likely looking into the backdating of a required document justifying the choice of the new space which was dated a few days after the lease was signed. However, the SEC Inspector General believes the justification document was actually finalized a month later. During the June 16th hearing on the SEC’s leasing practices, Rep. Tim Walz (D-MN) referred to the leasing debacle as a “beach ball” for Republicans to hit at the flawed Dodd-Frank bill because the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) “can’t do anything right”. The politically toxic beach ball in play is only getting bigger because backdating a leasing document is illegal. Furthermore, the consequences for the inept bureaucrats that inflated it could lead to fines or prison time if pursued by the DOJ...

Read more: http://atr.org/sec-bureaucrats-run-roughshod-over-taxpayer-a6323#ixzz1RXEUZFqh

[92nina]

Backdating documents and reason behind decision to lease stunning downtown office building unclear

Take this article and others I found to the fight to the Libs on their own turf; put the Left on the defensive at at Digg and at Reddit and in Stumbleupon and Delicious

[Zeppo]

Furthermore, the consequences for the inept bureaucrats that inflated it could lead to fines or prison time if pursued by the DOJ...

That would seem to require a President (and by extension, a DOJ) that had demonstrated some actual interest in seeing that the laws are faithfully executed...