According to an internal investigation, 33 SEC employees or contractors have been watching porn on company time and company computers. Not only are these obvious and widespread violations of SEC policy — and hopefully, the policy of every company outside of that specific industry — but the transgressions all occurred at a time when the financial companies that the watchdog was supposed to be watching were, ya know, busy burning down the global economy and all.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, had this to say:
“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 … This stunning report should make everyone question the wisdom of moving forward with plans to give regulators like the SEC even more widespread authority. Inexplicably, rather than exercise its existing regulatory enforcement authority, SEC officials were preoccupied with other distractions.”
Exactly how widespread were these “distractions”? In at least two cases, it was certainly impairing regulators’ ability to do their jobs.
A regional office staff accountant tried to access pornographic websites nearly 1,800 times, using her SEC laptop during a two-week period. She also had about 600 pornographic images saved on her laptop hard drive.
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.
For its part, the SEC issued this response:
“We will not tolerate the transgressions of the very few who bring discredit to their thousands of hardworking colleagues,” he said.
Depending on your moral sensibilities, the news may be worse for what it represents (employees who clearly aren’t fully committed to doing their jobs for 8 hours a day) than for what actually happened.
Either way, not a good look for the agency — both figuratively and literally.