Acadiana Business

SEC too preoccupied with porn to nab Stanford

by Leslie Turk

Just one week after the Securities and Exchange Commission's inspector general revealed that the SEC knew about Allen Stanford alleged Ponzi scheme since 1997 but failed to act, a clearer picture on the reasons for its incompetence is emerging: Its senior staffers were spending hours a day surfing porn sites.

Just one week after the Securities and Exchange Commission's inspector general revealed that the SEC knew about Allen Stanford alleged Ponzi scheme since 1997 but failed to act, a clearer picture on the reasons for its incompetence is emerging: Its senior staffers were spending hours a day surfing porn sites on the Internet.

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, 31 of which occurred in the 2.5 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed. Seventeen of the employees were "at a senior level," earning salaries of up to $222,418. The memo, first reported last night by ABC News, was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

Among the shocking findings of how SEC employees spent their time while the likes of Bernie Madoff and Stanford were helping put our economy on the verge of collapse:

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.
An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting Web sites 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. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.

Read more here.