SEC Staffers Fiddled While Investors Got Burned

We wrote back on April 29, 2010 about what some SEC staffers were doing while Bernard Madoff was busy perpetrating a massive fraud against his investors. Some high-level employees, including SEC attorneys, were spending as much as eight hours a day watching porn on their government computers.
Now comes word from The Denver Post that, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Denver attorney Kevin Evans, the SEC has disclosed that 33 SEC employees and employees of private contractors in the SEC’s Denver Regional Office and six other locations were investigated for accessing pornography sites on government computers during working hours. Seventeen of the employees had senior status and earned at least $99,356 in annual salaries.
In an earlier disclosure, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) says that 24 of the employees who were investigated either resigned or were suspended, counseled or reprimanded. It is unknown if any of those investigated were involuntarily terminated. A federal judge in Denver has ruled to protect the employees’ privacy by not releasing the names of the those involved.
It is our observation thataside from the moral implications of porn-watching it really doesn’t matter if the slackers were spending their days shopping or just randomly surfing the internet. The fact remains that taxpayers were paying these people handsomely to do the government’s work, including work investigating Madoff and other swindlers for the protection of the public.
Don’t we have the right to expect more integrity from our public employees, especially from those in supervisory positions? After all, while the supervisors are figuring out ways to waste their time, what are the people they are paid to supervise doing?

Read more:
-”Yet Another Colorado-Based Ponzi Scheme“, Business Litigation Blog, April 29, 2010
-”Bernard Madoff: An Epilogue – The SEC Looked but Failed to See (Part I)“, Business Litigation Blog, September 23, 2009

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