che nessuno mi venga più a dire che l'Italia è il paese messo peggio
SEC Report: Employees Browsed Porn, Ran Private Businesses
The Securities and Exchange Commission is taking a drubbing these days for its abject failure―despite detailed tips―to catch Bernie Madoff in what appears to be the biggest Ponzi scheme in our nation’s history.
Now, thanks to little-noticed report from the agency’s inspector general, we have a detailed glimpse into other bad behavior by some SEC employees.
The report, released the day after Thanksgiving, reveals that some employees at the agency were clearly preoccupied with matters other than their mission of "protecting investors and maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets." The semi-annual report to Congress, which covers the period from this past April to September, details among other things a handful of employees circumventing internal controls to download porn. Let’s pause for some detail:
[Investigators] uncovered evidence that an employee who was still in his probationary period had used his SEC laptop computer to attempt to access Internet websites classified as containing pornography, resulting in hundreds of access denials. The OIG investigation also disclosed that this employee successfully bypassed the Commission’s Internet filter by using a flash drive.
Presumably, that’s not the kind of initiative the SEC is looking for.
There were also more serious misdeeds raised by the report. For example, there is the case of the senior-level commission employee who "clearly and purposefully identified herself as a Commission employee when dealing with brokers about a family member’s account," making the broker in question feel like she was trying to "intimidate and bully him." The OIG referred the matter to management for "disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal." By the end of the period covered in the report, management "had not proposed or taken action."
There are other examples where the punishment was less than fulsome.
Investigators found employees in separate offices operated private photography businesses out of the commission:
An employee repeatedly and flagrantly used Commission resources, including Commission Internet access, e-mail, telephone and printer, in support of his private photography business for several years.
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Here at ProPublica we’ve just begun working our way through the fascinating 95-page document. Take a look at it yourself and let us know what you find.
http://www.propublica.org/article/sec-report-employees-browsed-porn-ran-private-businesses-1219