Thought everyone should see extracts of story you were talking about
If the SEC does this, surely there is absolutely no reason that our ASIC would not, instead of policing the algo or bot trading
Maybe it is too hard for them to understand, so their minds wander onto other things
Securities and Exchange Commission employees watched porn as economy crashed By Daniel Wagner in Washington From: AP April 23, 2010 Senior staffers at the SEC spent hours surfing porn websites when they should have been policing the financial SENIOR employees at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were being paid to police the financial system, an agency watchdog says.
The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by Associated Press.
The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the two years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed during the Global Financial Crisis.
The memo was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Senator Charles Grassley.
An SEC spokesman declined to comment overnight. The memo was first reported by ABC News in the US overnight.
It summarises findings of past inspector general probes and reports some shocking details:
- 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
- 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 "sexually suggestive and inappropriate images" on his hard drive
- Seventeen of the employees were "at a senior level", earning salaries of up to $US222,418 ($240,278)
- The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008
