Securities and Exchange Commission Missed Madoff 'Cause Employees Were Busy Looking At Porn
Not judging, and, actually, maybe this makes the Team SEC look a little better than before? It's not that they were deaf/dumb/stupid, they were just otherwise occupied/had their hands full? Don't think I'm reaching here.
The work computer of one regional supervisor for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showed more than 1,800 attempts to look up pornography in a 17-day span: "It was kind of distraction per se," he later told investigators.
But he wasn't alone. More than two dozen SEC employees and contractors over roughly the past two years have faced internal investigations after they were caught viewing pornography on their government computers, according to records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and other public documents."They're simply just stealing time," Allan Bachman, education manager for the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners said. "They're getting paid to do something that they're not supposed to be doing."
The supervisor later told an IG investigator that despite the blocked attempts, he still had been looking at pornography at work up to twice a day and it had "probably occurred for a long time." SEC records also provide insight into how some employees were able to bypass the Internet filters inside the SEC that were supposed to keep pornography off government computers. One worker said the computer system blocked him from visiting some Web sites but that he was able to look up blogs containing pornographic images. "I would click on it and it went to a blog and it wasn't blocked," he told investigators. "And that's how it started."
