Senior SEC Staffers Caught Surfing for Porn

According to the Wall Street Journal, 33 people at the agency (it employs about 4,000) were found to have looked at porn over the past five years, according to a summary of internal probes conducted by the SEC’s inspector general.  The report said 17 senior SEC employees (none were named), earning between $99,000 and $222,000 a year, were among those who viewed porn on their office computers or on laptops while traveling, according to the WSJ.

Nor are we just talking about an accidental visit to a site with questionable content.  The WSJ said that the report noted the following incidents:

• a senior enforcement attorney in a regional office viewed porn during work hours and had a thumb drive containing five hard-core videos;
• an attorney in Washington, D.C., spent up to eight hours a day watching pornography; and
• an accountant in a regional office was denied access by the government firewall 16,000 times when he tried to access Web pages containing pornography.

The behavior violated government-wide ethics rules, the report said, and agency spokesman John Nester said each has been “disciplined or is in the process of being disciplined. Some have already been suspended or dismissed.”