SEC Officials Watched Porn on the Job While Credit Markets Collapsed

Way to have a hand on the pulse of the markets as they were busy collapsing. An Inspector General report found that SEC officials during 2007 and 2008 found that a growing number of employees at the agency responsible for overseeing the financial markets was watching porn on the job.

Some of the investigation's findings are stunning in what some of these employees were doing (or more appropriately - not doing).

Among the startling findings:

- A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When his government computer ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs. He later agreed to resign.

- An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a single month from visiting "sex" or "pornography" sites, but still managed to amass a collection of "very graphic" material by using Google to bypass the SEC's internal filter. He wound up with a 2-week suspension.

- Seventeen of the randy 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.

If someone was trying to access porn 16,000 times in a single month, they probably weren't doing anything else. Including eating or breathing.

30 days in a month - 16,000 blocks? That works out to 533 a day. 22 attempts an hour if they were trying to do so without sleeping or more than 66 attempts an hour if doing so only during an 8-hour "workday". And yet this person managed to get only a 2-week suspension?

That's nuts.

These are people who are not only violating the SEC's workplace policies, but were delerict in their responsibilities.

These are people who should have been fired for cause.