The SEC’s X-Rated Scandal

During one of the greatest financial crises in our nation’s history, senior staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent their days looking at online pornography.

No, seriously. They were looking at porn all day .

According to a memo obtained by the AP , the SEC’s inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years and found:

_ 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.

Set aside for the moment that these folks were looking at pictures of unclothed women when they should have been uncovering the next Bernie Madoff and consider what this says about their work. How can a senior staffer spend “up to eight hours a day” doing anything that is not work related and still have a job? If you are earning $222,418 a year, then you should presumably be doing work that is necessary and valuable. So why didn’t anyone notice that the Kick Ass (2010) work wasn’t getting done?

Pornography may have been the downfall of the individuals but the institutional problem appears to be a total absence of oversight and leadership.

Update : David Mills adds a point that I forgot to mention: “Readers may want to know that Mary Eberstadt has an essay on pornography appearing in the next issue, written with her usual entertaining prose and provocative insights.”