Thaindian News

New York, Apr. 23 (ANI): The chief of the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) has confirmed in a memo that America’s top financial watchdogs spent hours gawking at porn web sites as the economy collapsed.

SEC Inspector General David Kotz wrote the report in response to a request from Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley.

The shocking findings include Securities and Exchange Commission senior staffers using government computers to browse for booty and an accountant who tried to access the raunchy sites 16,000 times in one month, the New York Daily News reports.

Their titillating pastime was discovered during 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, said the memo.

A foreign news agency report said 31 of those probes occurred in the 2-1/2 years since the country’s financial system nearly crashed.

Among the disclosures are that 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 dollars.

- 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.

An SEC spokesman declined to comment last night. (ANI)