April 23, 2010

SEC staffers watched porn as economy crashed!

This news should probably piss me off, but my first response to that CNN headline was guffaws of laughter. Ain't America grand?

As the country was sinking into its worst financial crisis in more than 70 years, Security and Exchange Commission employees and contractors cruised porn sites and viewed sexually explicit pictures using government computers, according to an agency report obtained by CNN.

"During the past five years, the SEC OIG (Office of Inspector General) substantiated that 33 SEC employees and or contractors violated Commission rules and policies, as well as the government-wide Standards of Ethical Conduct, by viewing pornographic, sexually explicit or sexually suggestive images using government computer resources and official time," said a summary of the investigation by the inspector general's office.

More than half of the workers made between $99,000 and $223,000. All the cases took place over the past five years.

The inspector general's report includes specific examples of misuse by employees.

A regional office staff accountant tried to access pornographic Web sites nearly 1,800 times, using her SEC laptop during a two-week period. She also had about 600 pornographic images saved on the hard drive of her laptop.

Separately, a senior attorney at SEC headquarters admitted to downloading pornography up to eight hours a day, according to the investigation.

"In fact, this attorney downloaded so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office," the inspector general's report said.

"It is nothing short of disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at pornography than taking action to help stave off the events that brought our nation's economy to the brink of collapse," said Rep. Darrell Issa. The Republican is a ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

You can go here for the full article, if you feel the need for more entertainment.

1 comment:

  1. Well, doesn't that just knock your dick in the dirt, as my former brother-in-law is fond of saying in such situations.

    ReplyDelete