SEC Absorbed With Porn During Economic Crisis

As the Obama Administration pushes for more government regulation, a new report reveals that the agency charged with policing the nation’s financial industry was preoccupied with pornography while the economy crumbled.

The country’s financial system collapsed while employees and high-ranking managers at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regularly spent work hours gawking at pornography web sites on their government computers, according to an agency inspector general probe obtained this week by a major news organization.  

Dozens of SEC employees, including senior officers with lucrative six-figure salaries, view explicit images on their agency computers during work hours. One senior attorney at the SEC headquarters in Washington D.C. spent up to eight hours a day accessing internet porn. When his government computer ran out of file space, he downloaded pornographic images on compact discs and stored them in boxes in his office.

One agency accountant tried to access porn websites 16,000 times in one month and got busted with hundreds of pornographic images on her computer hard drive. Another SEC accountant used his government computer to upload his own sexually explicit videos onto various porn websites that he frequented during business hours.

At least seventeen of the SEC offenders are senior-level employees earning taxpayer-financed salaries of up to $222,418. As deplorable as this behavior is for public servants, it’s not limited to this agency. Last year employees at the National Science Foundation, the multi billion-dollar federal agency that promotes science and national health, were exposed for spending significant portions of their workdays watching, downloading and e-mailing pornography on their government computers.

Additionally, a senior National Park Service official who oversaw one of the agency’s most popular facilities, the Gettysburg National Military Park, for years used his office computer to view thousands of sexually explicit images. He was simply reassigned with no further consequences.