Associated Press | Republicans are stepping up their criticism California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, 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 Thursday that SEC officials “were preoccupied with other distractions” when they should have been overseeing the growing problems in the financial system.
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. The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed. The staffers’ behavior violated government-wide ethics rules, it says. The memo provides fresh ammunition for Republicans who suspect the timing of the SEC’s lawsuit last week against Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs Group Inc. News of the suit came as the Senate prepared to take up a sweeping overhaul of the rules governing banks and other financial companies. The memo was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. It summarizes 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 $222,418. – 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. An SEC spokesman declined to comment Thursday night. About 16 percent of men with Internet access at work admit to looking at online porn while at the office, according to a 2006 survey by Websense Inc. Former SEC spokesman Michael Robinson said he shares the public’s outrage about SEC staffers who enjoyed porn on the taxpayer dime when they were supposed to be keeping the markets safe. “That kind of behavior is just intolerable and atrocious,” said Robinson, now with Levick Strategic Communications. He said he expects the head of the SEC, Mary Schapiro and her team, are “very focused on” the issue. Schapiro has been parrying GOP complaints about the Goldman Sachs lawsuit, which agency officials hoped would mark a new era of tougher oversight of Wall Street. They followed high-profile embarrassments including the failure to catch Ponzi kings Bernard Madoff and R. Allen Stanford. Republican lawmakers also accused the SEC of being influenced by politics. The SEC’s commissioners approved the Goldman charges on a rare 3-2 vote. The two who objected were Republicans. Schapiro is a registered independent who has been appointed by presidents of both parties.
California Rep. Darrell Issa, seen here in 2009, called the reports of SEC staffers watching pornography “disturbing.” (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
of the Securities and Exchange Commission following reports that senior agency staffers spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were supposed to be policing the nation’s financial system.
GOP: SEC staff watched porn amid financial crisis
Posted April 23, 2010 at 8:48 a.m.
Oh, lighten up. Imagine that, even “senior officials” like to see pictures of the oposite sex without their clothes off! A study came out a few years ago that looking at pictures of women’s breasts every day was GOOD FOR MEN and decreased stress levels and well-being. Pretty intuitive. Too bad the PC police will never be able to accept scientific fact.
While I am a political independent, the partisan nature of this leaves any conclusion highly suspect. Since being dumped by the general public in the last elections, the GOP has demonstrated its prowess at ad hominem attacks, and this article just adds more documentation to that fact.
Now we know what they’re doing when they’re not screwing us.
“The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008.”
Fascinating that the jump in behavior occurred during the Busch administration, when everyone at the SEC was rewarded for turing their backs on Wall Street malfeasance.
Yes, JohnH, it’s perfectly fine that they’d look at porn. ON THEIR OWN TIME. It’s not “PC police” to say they shouldn’t have been browsing porn at work.
“The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008.”
Fascinating that the jump in behavior occurred during the Busch administration, when everyone at the SEC was rewarded for turing their backs on Wall Street malfeasance.
Well now – the Republicans are trying to say that the SEC is political with it’s report on Goldman Sachs. Will they say that this little scandal (which it isn’t) is political also? I mean, afterall, this happened during the Bush Administration – - not Obama’s according to the dates in the story…
i have no problem with this as long as there were no repetitive arm or wrist injuries as a result of this porn watching.
high-ranking SEC staff LOOKING at porn while many poor families r LOOKING at losing their homes, u r absolutely pathetic SEC!
SEC looking at porn while making 222,000.00 dollars, wow! any pictures of these people?
Remember this story next time you hear more calls for increased government regulation.
Interesting that Republicans are complaining about the people working at the SEC while the Republicans had the White House (and going back 5 years both houses of congress). It is rare these days to actually see the Republicans admitting their iown incompetence (although it is obvious to the majority of the country).
The timing is interesting as well as Republican leaders just met with the Wall Street people and secured their campaign funding. Republicans…now fighting financial reform. Does anyone really think independents are going to vote for these charlatans?
This is just so awesome on so many levels.
hey isn’t that convenient? just days after the SEC brings a case against powerful Goldman Sachs, some attack dogs are raiding confidential personnel files to point out politically vulnerable employees at the SEC!
Imagine that…33 probes…out of how many employees? Oh! 3800 + contractors, really?! I guess you could find 10x that many goofs among any comparable sized group.
And since when is it ok to quote the FORMER spokesman of an organization in a story?! Nice journo! I mean, he works somewhere else now, doesn’t he? I wonder if that new place does any business with Goldman Sachs…hmmm….
At least I now know that my 401K was not the only thing….”GOING DOWN”
I am more shocked to read the investigating officials and senior managers acted like they didn’t know. They knew all along, who are they tying to kid.
Perhaps we all need to watch “The Warning” (PBS/Frontline) again. Since Congress through the CTFC (a government agency) under the bus, why are we discussing the integrity of the SEC, which is NOT a government agency?
If there is anything “new” here, it is further realization that our government (ALL of it) is in bed with Wall Street (re. “Card Game”/PBS Frontline) and that “regulators” have very little to do other than watch porn BECAUSE Congress was blocking any effective regulation anyway.
I wonder how many hours were spent working on Soduko or crossword puzzles before the regulators got bored and started surfing.
Since we’re now “demanding” financial reform, can we please start over and do this right? We don’t need another governmental agency (we have plenty that are readily available) and we cannot allow government officials to draft policy who accept campaign donations from the financial industry.
Men are going to look at porn when given the chance. I blame the government for not spending a couple of thousand dollars on a decent firewall. If you try to look at anything improper at my work a nice page comes up thats says blocked.
This isn’t 1995. There have been porn filters that are cheap and affordable for business use for about 10 years.
What’s the big deal. The last Democrat President had sex in on the job in the oval office! Liberal perverts just do what they do!
Hey ethan, SEC is of COURSE a government agency. just because it’s an independent agency doesn’t make it outside the government. might want to lighten up on the ol propaganda thar and read something factual…?
Can we have the same study done on members of Congress’ use of internet time? If the SEC had done a great job of nailing Madoff and keeping Lehman in line, would we care about their web surfing?
I understand there was a similar situation in Congress in the Financial Service Committee. As it turns out, the porn in was actually a video of Barney Frank with Freddy and Fannie in a threesome.I believe the camera operator was Chris Dodd
I stand corrected. Thank you.
My original argument is still valid. The problem is Congress, not the SEC.
I know first hand of feds browsing porn at work, and nothing can be done about it. Even when caught red-handed (no pun intended) along with corroborating forensic evidence from their HDD, nothing was done. Tell me again why government employees need a union?
The private sector already has ways to track this. This is just getting press NOW?
Is this like in the case of the Catholic church?
Republicans are upset about THIS sort of conduct now, but if I remember correctly a couple of republican senators were caught a) soliciting sex in a public bathroom and b) sending illicit emails to a teen-aged boy working in his capitol hill office…
now that it’s politically convenient, they don’t like it?
This article is so dripping with irony, it’s practically pornographic. I love how the Republicans, who would love nothing more than the SEC to essentially disappear so their belove free market can reign free, are calling them out for not regulating better! I’m amazed he could pull this off with anything resembling a straight face.
Talk about foxes policing the henhouse. Was that not GOP members going to sex clubs on the taxpayers’ dime? And let’s not forget that Louisiana senator who was hiring hookers. And let’s not forget that Republican Mark Foley was using his government computer to solicit teenage boys.
I pretty much assume that anyone working for the government, especially politicians, are sex-crazed perverts as well as hypocrites of the highest order.
The only thing making this into a partisan issue does is underscore the hypocrisy that defines the Republican Party and the self-righteous, sanctimonious perverts that are members of that party. Politicians are the absolute last people in the world who should be making an issue of others’ hang-ups. Politicians are, by general rule, complete perverts and scumbags.
I guess this is what you do to take focus off the fact that your party has accomplished nothing and has absolutely nothing worthwhile to provide to the people of this nation. This is truly a waste of tax dollars. The Republican Party is a failure and a joke.
These staffers, should be compelled to pay back their entire salaries including interest to the government (taxpayers). The SEC attorneys who acted so should have their law licenses suspended as well.
Perhaps the next time they are so fortunate to have the privilege and responsibility of a government sector job they will buckle down and do work at the workplace.
I’m not sure what bothers me more about this — that it was porn these workers were looking at or that they were doing ANYTHING on the Internet on company time besides working. Let’s leave porn out of it for a minute, the fact that these workers were doing anything non-job related on their workstations during company time on the taxpayers dollar is simply beyond wrong.
This pointless infighting detracts from our ability to get useful reforms passed. This reminds me of a bunch of children fighting on a playground. People in government need to grow up and stop with this constant pettiness toward one another. We have bigger problems to address than whether or not some employees were looking at pornography.
They are needed so that employees cannot be fired for political reasons. They should be fired for this though.
Learn how to spell before you criticize, please.
George W. BUSH, not Busch the NASCAR driver.
SEC and all US government computers should be required to use software that prevents users from visiting porn and other commercial websites not relevant to their jobs.
They should publish the names and post the pictures of these people in the newspaper. And daddy (and/or mommy)- what did you do at work today???????????? Me thinks this might slow down the porn surfing at the SEC…but, that’s just my opinion – I could be wrong.