Posted on 04/22/2010 9:32:41 PM PDT by myknowledge
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 on Thursday by The Associated Press.
The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 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 U.S. Senator Charles Grassley.
An SEC spokesman declined to comment on Thursday night.
The memo was first reported on Thursday evening by ABC News. It summarises findings of past inspector general probes and reports some shocking findings:
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 $US222,418 ($A239,933.12).
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.
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."
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.
With government:
THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY
But the Rats want to give these same guys more athority over our financial system.
Saw that movie on TV the other day. Makes one feel old...
We keep hoping God will save America. Save us from the muslims, save us from Obama, save us from this, save us from that. God isn’t going to save us. He’s going to destroy us. We’re the new Sodom and Gomorrah.
If we repented He would...it will take alot before that happens IMO. God will protect His own...He always has.
Have a read at Revelation 18 for more prophetic details.
Standard work week is 40 hours, but let's say this guy is in the office 80 hours each week that month. That's 320 hours total. If all he did was surf porn, that's 50 times per hour he was blocked. About once per minute.
If true, that's quite an obsession, one more fit for mandatory therapy (than a mere 14 day suspension).
When I read the testimony of one of the survivors of a Nazi death camp, I realized that God doesn’t save anyone - - he charges us to stand up and do the labors.
I’m very active this election cycle. I hope all of you are.
Yes...everyone needs to be active. We signed like 50 people up to be precinct committee people at our Tax Day Tea Party. Some of those people didn’t even know what a PC does. That says something. People WANT to do something...I’m hoping for a landslide.
Good work, Hildy. (I thought you were ignoring me)
I’m getting involved in two races here and will be speaking at some community meetings. Next week I meet with a big joe; it may lead to more involvement.
We have to turn this nation around!
What was the gay/straight breakdown?
There is a solid investment tip in this article if you have eyes to see it.
From February 2nd of this year from CBS News:
More than two dozen employees and contractors at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission were investigated in the past two years for viewing pornography on their government computers, the Washington Times reports.
Records from the SEC's office of inspector general showed that one SEC regional supervisor's work computer showed more than 1,800 "access denials" to pornography over a 17-day period, the Times reports. Clicking on one Web site could trigger dozens of "access denials" to pop-up ads. Still, the supervisor reportedly told investigators, "It was kind of distraction per se."
The Times obtained more than 150 pages from the investigations through a Freedom of Information Act Request. Finding a couple dozen employees -- out of a staff of about 3,500 -- surfing porn at work is not a problem unique to the SEC, Allan Bachman, education manager for the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, told the Times. He said, however, that it was troubling because "they're getting paid to do something that they're not supposed to be doing."
The SEC is charged with protecting investors facilitating capital growth, and maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets.
The names of the employees under investigation were withheld from the documents provided to the Times, as were individual disciplinary decisions. The SEC reportedly said, however, that sanctions generally range from counseling to dismissal.
You know the old saying...
‘When the going gets tough - the tough surf for porn...’
“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.”
It’s more than that. It’s disturbing that the SEC is so bloated that that many people were doing nothing and nobody noticed that work wasn’t getting done.
Positions need to be eliminated.
Government can go to hell. It’s way past time to clean house!!
Yeah, but at least they kept the porn industry from experiencing a financial meltdown and needing a government bailout.
Of course. We wished we had done so a long time ago. The image of government today has degraded to nothing more than a social club of elitist criminals who plunder the nation’s monetary wealth like pirates and newly-found treasure.
And these yahoos are going to retire on luxurious pensions paid by the taxpayers? Or they think they are. A whole bunch of them need to be rounded up and sent to prison, starting with their ‘overseers’ in congress.
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