SEC Employees Fiddle With Themselves As Wall St. Burns

An internal audit of SEC employee computer use has uncovered some staggering details about exactly what employees and contractors were doing with their time and their laptops. The results:

“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.

The aerial view presented in the above block is only the tip of the iceberg, which shows that several employees really were caught with their junk in their hands when the crisis hit. To wit:

• An accountant logged onto porn sites 1800 times over a two-week period using her work-provided lappy, storing 600 images on it.
• An attorney owned up to spending up to eight hours a day casting about the dark recesses of the internet looking for happy hand time shots.
• This same attorney downloaded so much of the smut that he not only filled the hard drive, but also boxes (BOXES!) of CDs and DVDs with the stuff.

Like, whoa. Now, obviously, the SEC employs considerably more than 33 people, and these two are extreme outliers, especially the one guy who probably has a serious problem that requires therapy more than ridicule*. However, the lack of oversight that allows employees to lose entire work-days to finding porn is the same lack of oversight that allowed the banks they were supposed to be regulating to get away with causing the country’s worst financial catastrophe in at least 70 years. It’s a microcosm of the whole crisis: people more interested in getting themselves off than what they’re supposed to be doing, and no one engaged or clued-in enough to notice what was going on — what with the interest in getting one’s self off being paramount.

And now a conversation with the person who brought this to my attention:
Dr. Prof.: nothing mind blowing here…but take a look at the #’s
Dr. Prof.: that is a WHOLE lotta work porn
Ghost: That is a ton of porn.
Dr. Prof.: i mean, given that ANY work porn is a lot, like, 2 accidental seconds is too much
Ghost: Also, her!!!
Dr. Prof.:: i know!!
Ghost: “in boxes“!! As in more than one box!
Dr. Prof.: it really is a ton of work porn
Dr. Prof.: its a ton of porn for AVN convention, nevermind a federal job.
Ghost: Boxes! “I don’t even own a gun, let alone many guns that would necessitate an entire rack!”

*Obviously, this didn’t stop the ridicule. But seriously: get help, anonymous SEC attorney with what is obviously a crippling addiction.

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